Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
Speaker 1: can make your own decisions. Welcome to It could Happen
Speaker 1: Here the show where I had to change the introduction
Speaker 1: because Sophie said it would confuse people. So now we're
Speaker 1: just doing the boring thing and saying the actual name
Speaker 1: of the show, which is it could Happen Here. Um.
Speaker 1: It's a show about the fact that the society is
Speaker 1: kind of falling apart or changing, depending on your perspective
Speaker 1: of things, and people need to prepare for what's coming,
Speaker 1: which is a world of greater instability and economic collapse
Speaker 1: and rising authoritarianism and increasing fights in order to reverse
Speaker 1: and stymy all of those terrible things. UM. And you know,
Speaker 1: one of the things I've seen in some early feedback
Speaker 1: from um other stuff I've done on other shows, and
Speaker 1: also from earlier episodes of this is people who will
Speaker 1: go like, Hey, everything you're saying about mutual aid is rad,
Speaker 1: but I live in X town in whatever state, and
Speaker 1: there's there's nothing here. There's not not an organized left.
Speaker 1: I don't I don't know of any mutual aid groups. Um,
Speaker 1: how can I get involved? Or like, how could I
Speaker 1: start my own organization and try to get people involved?
Speaker 1: And then the another thing we get asked a lot
Speaker 1: is like, Hey, what you're saying about building resiliency and
Speaker 1: preparing for difficult times, gardening and whatnot sounds great, But
Speaker 1: I'm poor as ship and I live in a tiny
Speaker 1: apartment um or whatever. I I have no resources or
Speaker 1: no room. Um, even if you're not none of enough money,
Speaker 1: like I'm in the middle of some horribly dense city.
Speaker 1: So this week we're gonna be talking around those subjects
Speaker 1: in a number of different ways. And to kind of
Speaker 1: kick us off, I've got, of course, Garrison with me.
Speaker 1: Woke come up at nine in the morning. How are
Speaker 1: you doing, Garrison ungodly early? Yeah, it's it's it's hideous,
Speaker 1: it's hideous. Um. And then Margaret Killjoy, who's up at
Speaker 1: a much more reasonable hour because time zones are a
Speaker 1: wild ass thing. Margaret, How do you? How do we?
Speaker 1: How do we introduce you? You're an author, you're a
Speaker 1: writer of fiction. You host a podcast called Live Like
Speaker 1: the World Is Dying, right, and you've had me on
Speaker 1: and you talk about a lot of the same things
Speaker 1: we talked about, and it could happen here. We're actually
Speaker 1: shamelessly stealing your your your podcast in order to make
Speaker 1: it corporate and sold out. How are you doing, Margaret,
Speaker 1: I'm excited to be part of the corporate, sold out podcast, um,
Speaker 1: and and actually very glad that you all do a
Speaker 1: wider audience thing. But um, I think that is a
Speaker 1: decent way to introduce me. I do a lot of
Speaker 1: different things, and I've been doing also, like organizing and
Speaker 1: trying to seek radical political change for about twenty years. Yes,
Speaker 1: degrees of success. Actually mostly not to any success, because
Speaker 1: we actually still live in maybe a worse society than
Speaker 1: we were in two years ago. Yeah. I tell people
Speaker 1: that I dropped out of college to ride freight trains
Speaker 1: and overthrow the government, and I wasn't good at either
Speaker 1: of those things. I mean, you have all your limbs,
Speaker 1: that's true. I do have all of my limbs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you're not in prison, um, which is really all
Speaker 1: anyone can ask of the universe. Um. So, you have
Speaker 1: started a number of organizations in your career as an
Speaker 1: activist in kind of that hat. And I guess let's
Speaker 1: start with like, yes, somebody who lives in a place,
Speaker 1: there's no kind of really really organized left. There's probably
Speaker 1: not in a lot of these places much of even
Speaker 1: like a democratic party. There's certainly not mutual aid efforts. UM.
Speaker 1: And I do think that there's a well, well, mutual
Speaker 1: aid as a concept is is pretty firmly rooted an anarchism.
Speaker 1: There's mutual aid kind of organizations that are are not
Speaker 1: particularly leftist or at least people doing stuff like that.
Speaker 1: Like I think a good recent example will be the
Speaker 1: Occasion Navy, who did a lot of rescues after the
Speaker 1: most recent set of hurricanes, where certainly not a left
Speaker 1: or an anarchist organization, but a lot of what they're
Speaker 1: doing is um is a community aiding itself. UM So,
Speaker 1: I don't know where where do we where? Where do
Speaker 1: you want to start here? Well, I guess I mean
Speaker 1: specifically in disaster times, you don't necessarily work with the
Speaker 1: people that you would assume that you're expecting to work with.
Speaker 1: And you know, one of the one of the stories
Speaker 1: that really sticks with me is like a friend of
Speaker 1: mine who's this, you know, um train riding anarchist with
Speaker 1: covered in tattoos and and all of that. And during
Speaker 1: flood relief in eastern North Carolina was like flying into
Speaker 1: storms and small planes with libertarians because the people who
Speaker 1: are willing to fly small planes into storms and own
Speaker 1: planes tend to be the more libertarian side of things.
Speaker 1: And so here's anarchists and libertarians working together to get
Speaker 1: people what they need. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: I try, because this is one of the biggest questions
Speaker 1: I think that the left faces, and you know, people
Speaker 1: trying to make the world better faces, is how do
Speaker 1: we get people involved? And also how do people get
Speaker 1: involved if no one's helping them get involved? And um,
Speaker 1: I don't have all the answers about it, but it's
Speaker 1: something that I I think about obsessively some a lot.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that I really try and
Speaker 1: focus on with people as people say, well, I want
Speaker 1: to be prepared, and you talk about community being a
Speaker 1: very important part of apparedness, but I don't feel like
Speaker 1: I have a community, because we live in a very
Speaker 1: isolated society. And one of the main things I try
Speaker 1: and remind people though, is that in the same way
Speaker 1: that property relations break down, like someone's like, oh, I
Speaker 1: don't have any stuff, and if the apocalypse comes, what
Speaker 1: will I do? And like, well, the kind of the
Speaker 1: answer is that like, once property relations break down, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff and it's very people. There will
Speaker 1: be much stuff around, Like warehouses exist full of stuff
Speaker 1: and yeah, Amazon warehouses are going to become like fun boxes. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: slash fortified outposts alleged yea. And community is the same way,
Speaker 1: not that you would go raid community, but instead that
Speaker 1: um some people. Yeah, that's true. And but you can
Speaker 1: you can create community in times of crisis in a
Speaker 1: way that's actually harder to do when the existing social
Speaker 1: order exists. And and the the thing I always say
Speaker 1: uses my my dumb example of this about how people
Speaker 1: come together during times of crisis is you know, when
Speaker 1: I'm waiting for the bus and you know, some city
Speaker 1: or something, and no one talks to each other if
Speaker 1: you don't know each other until the bus is like
Speaker 1: five minutes late, and then everyone is comparing notes about
Speaker 1: where they think they saw the bus last and everyone's
Speaker 1: friends and sharing snacks and things. You know. So in
Speaker 1: some ways, I'm like, be optimistic if you don't already
Speaker 1: no community. Yeah, And I think there's also things you
Speaker 1: can do that don't necessarily cost a lot of money
Speaker 1: to both kind of build resiliency and kind of community connections. Now,
Speaker 1: one of those things I've had a lot of friends
Speaker 1: in difference at ease work for there. There will be
Speaker 1: different farming co ops, right, and generally the arrangement is
Speaker 1: you volunteer some sort of time helping them with you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of ship work on farms, and in
Speaker 1: return you generally get some amount of produce or whatever.
Speaker 1: But really what you're getting is practical experience growing food,
Speaker 1: and you're meeting the kind of people who are interested
Speaker 1: in growing their own food, and you know, those kind
Speaker 1: of connections can be really helpful when things get worse.
Speaker 1: And so I think it doesn't necessarily it doesn't have
Speaker 1: to cost much to to try building community now, or
Speaker 1: to at least try putting yourself in some of the
Speaker 1: spaces where the kind of people you might want to
Speaker 1: be in, the kind of people you you might want
Speaker 1: to know when things get worse might be Yeah, and
Speaker 1: there's a lot of, um, there's a lot of like opportunities.
Speaker 1: The world kind of wants you to volunteer, you know,
Speaker 1: there's all of these things that if you reach out
Speaker 1: to people and you're like, hey, I don't have any connections,
Speaker 1: but I'm interested olunteering, there are types of organizations that
Speaker 1: do interesting things that are open to that. You know,
Speaker 1: I kind of maybe it's terrible, but whenever my friends,
Speaker 1: especially my friends were in their twenties or something who
Speaker 1: we don't really feel kind of lost and without direction
Speaker 1: for a while, I'm like, go sit in a tree,
Speaker 1: like go join direct action environmentalist groups that are desperate
Speaker 1: for people to come live their lives in this like
Speaker 1: self sustaining community. That is incredibly traumatic and hard to do.
Speaker 1: And I don't necessarily recommend this to everybody, but you know,
Speaker 1: it's a thing that you can do, is that you
Speaker 1: can go participate in in different movements, some of which
Speaker 1: do want strangers, you know, some of which don't write. Um,
Speaker 1: you can't show up to everything and be like why
Speaker 1: aren't you including me? You're a bunch of assholes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And um, I don't know. So when when it comes
Speaker 1: to actually like trying to start something, um like like
Speaker 1: like going out and accepting, Okay, there's not maybe I can't.
Speaker 1: I can't leave my family behind and go to a
Speaker 1: tree set. But I would like to, you know, start
Speaker 1: a community engaging in something direct Maybe that's not illegal
Speaker 1: direct action, maybe it is. It's none of my business. Um,
Speaker 1: how do you recommend people just kind of start organizations?
Speaker 1: Find people avoid pitfalls? Like you know, if you've got
Speaker 1: to make your own mutual aid group because there's not
Speaker 1: one in your town and you you wanna. I mean,
Speaker 1: people have expressed a desire to understand how to do that.
Speaker 1: So I'm you know, I've never I'm not an organizer.
Speaker 1: I'm barely a journalist. I am curious for your thoughts
Speaker 1: on that. Well, okay, so as my own caveat is,
Speaker 1: I'm no longer an organizer. I spent much of my
Speaker 1: twenties being part of organizations, and then I finally, um
Speaker 1: realize that I can just kind of do whatever I
Speaker 1: want and then figure out how to plug that into
Speaker 1: other people's things. But I will say the the main
Speaker 1: way I've heard this expressed and I believe in, is
Speaker 1: that we should do if you want to start getting involved,
Speaker 1: is you think about what you're good at and where
Speaker 1: you think about what you want to be good at,
Speaker 1: and then you think about the problems that you're facing,
Speaker 1: and then you think about how to apply what you're
Speaker 1: good at to the problems that you're facing. So if
Speaker 1: you're sitting there and you're like, well, I'm a I'm
Speaker 1: a really good illustrator, right, I'm not. I'm a terrible illustrator.
Speaker 1: But let's say you're a good illustrator, and then you
Speaker 1: you could basically reach out to organizations that maybe you
Speaker 1: aren't even close and be like, hey, I'm an illustrator.
Speaker 1: Is there anything I can do for you? All? Um?
Speaker 1: But if what you want to do is start an
Speaker 1: organization locally, it's okay to start small and build up.
Speaker 1: It's okay to you know, it's kind of a if
Speaker 1: you build it, they will come kind of thing in general,
Speaker 1: like if you start, if you figure out what you
Speaker 1: need to do, you know, we want to distribute supplies, right,
Speaker 1: then you just do it like you just. Um, even
Speaker 1: if you start by yourself or ideally you kind of
Speaker 1: start with yourself and a couple of friends that you
Speaker 1: drag into it, and then you see what gets inertia
Speaker 1: like rather than like forcing, rather than starting off, don't
Speaker 1: start off by writing your by laws. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe start with an idea of like if you have
Speaker 1: a cool name that you want to use, like sometimes
Speaker 1: that's great to start with, like a hook, and like
Speaker 1: starting a band or something. You know you'd start with
Speaker 1: like the thing that brings everyone together, which is sometimes
Speaker 1: a clever name, but but mostly you just start by
Speaker 1: doing it. And um, you know. One of the one
Speaker 1: of the ways that's longest standing that people can get
Speaker 1: involved with locally or start locally, and there's a lot
Speaker 1: of resources about how to do it is is Food
Speaker 1: Not Bombs. Food Not Bombs is a a mutual aid
Speaker 1: project that's existed and I wish I knew off the
Speaker 1: top of my head since when I want to say,
Speaker 1: the late seventies, but I really couldn't tell you. And
Speaker 1: it's just food. It's just organizing food to give to
Speaker 1: people in public. And it's actually wild how illegal it
Speaker 1: is in some places, Like people get arrested for Food
Speaker 1: No Bombs all the time in Florida in a couple
Speaker 1: of other places. But yeah, we talked about them in
Speaker 1: the first part of the season, because there have been
Speaker 1: a couple of point. I don't think nationally the FBI
Speaker 1: is talked about them as a terror threat, but like
Speaker 1: in the Austin Field office, and I think one or
Speaker 1: two other places they've been like discussed as a terrorist
Speaker 1: threat for handing out food. I've had like helicopters flying
Speaker 1: overhead and like riots around the corner and stuffed for
Speaker 1: for handing out food with food ut bombs. Yeah, it's uh,
Speaker 1: they missed the second half of the name. I guess,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know. I think maybe if
Speaker 1: we were to create bombs, not food, we we might
Speaker 1: not get as much police attention. But that's just a
Speaker 1: seery Yeah, well what everyone says that we need food
Speaker 1: and no one says this. No one would ever say this,
Speaker 1: no one would ever believe this. But we need food
Speaker 1: and bombs. You food and bombs, yea, bombs for some
Speaker 1: food for others. We don't judge. We provide explosives and
Speaker 1: we provide food. Yeah, okay, So if you can, I
Speaker 1: think if you can, you start by working, You figure
Speaker 1: out what you're good at. You find a group of
Speaker 1: people that are interested in accomplishing the same thing who
Speaker 1: maybe have similar skill sets or different skill sets, and
Speaker 1: you figure out what you can do, and you start
Speaker 1: doing it, and you organize calling people and being like, hey,
Speaker 1: well you donate to us, or getting all your friends
Speaker 1: together to give you stuff to to redistribute or whatever, right,
Speaker 1: putting out calls on social media for things to redistribute.
Speaker 1: You know, most structures start grassroots, and most of the
Speaker 1: time they kind of tend to do best when they're
Speaker 1: grassroots instead of becoming a little more codified. So, if possible,
Speaker 1: do that. But if you're just you, um, sometimes tying
Speaker 1: into existing organizations is a thing worth doing. And if
Speaker 1: there's nothing locally, you can look at things a little
Speaker 1: further away, or you can look at things that are
Speaker 1: on maybe on a national level. But there's a lot
Speaker 1: of dangers in joining existing organizations and structures, and I guess,
Speaker 1: I guess I would say there's like three types of danger,
Speaker 1: and one is that you talked about all the time.
Speaker 1: And thanks for bringing into the leftist vocabulary the word grifter.
Speaker 1: I never heard anyone use the word grifter until your podcast.
Speaker 1: It's the most important word in the American English for sure.
Speaker 1: We live in a fucking grifter Republic. It's incredible and
Speaker 1: we always have this isn't new, Yeah, but we need
Speaker 1: more words because we also need the word for people
Speaker 1: who are looking for useful idiots. And there's a lot
Speaker 1: of social movie mints and not to be like I
Speaker 1: I support the Left. I think that what we're attempting
Speaker 1: to do is very worthwhile, and I like us more
Speaker 1: than the other side by a fair amount. But there's
Speaker 1: a lot of things that there's a lot of problems
Speaker 1: with the Left, and one of them is that people
Speaker 1: are looking either to just have you as a body
Speaker 1: with no decision making power and no autonomy, which doesn't
Speaker 1: actually build a better world because you're just stop being
Speaker 1: a cog in their machine and become a cog in
Speaker 1: our machine. Right. And then there's also people who are
Speaker 1: kind of um looking for useful idiots canon fodder, like
Speaker 1: people to hang around while they while they do stuff,
Speaker 1: or you know, and I don't want to go to
Speaker 1: hard bodies to stand out in front of cop shops sometimes, yeah,
Speaker 1: and even like you know, even like movements that I
Speaker 1: really care about that might do a lot of like
Speaker 1: non violence of this obedience, although I don't I'm not
Speaker 1: particularly I'm not passed this personally, but you know, it's
Speaker 1: a very useful strategy non violence of these obedience. But
Speaker 1: sometimes they're like, oh, you're young and new, lock your
Speaker 1: self to this thing, get arrested. And I would definitely
Speaker 1: say to people, don't get arrested on purpose at your
Speaker 1: first actions, like, don't be anyone else's cannon fodder until
Speaker 1: you feel like you are part of the decision making
Speaker 1: and part of like like you really matter and like
Speaker 1: then then don't um do dangerous things for other people's projects,
Speaker 1: like the ship that states do that's so messed up
Speaker 1: is is turn human bodies into resources that then get
Speaker 1: sacrificed for unclear ends. Um, And unless you feel like
Speaker 1: you have some sort of like there are times we're
Speaker 1: being arrested is necessary and helpful, but unless unless you
Speaker 1: feel you fully understand not just why you're doing it,
Speaker 1: but also that like you you you're not being told
Speaker 1: to do it, you have autonomy and like, I'm going
Speaker 1: to do this thing that I know will end in
Speaker 1: my arrest because I like, I don't know. That's probably
Speaker 1: like I think most people in that position know this,
Speaker 1: but I definitely have encountered some uncomfortable situations in the past,
Speaker 1: I'm sure similar to once you Have, where it did
Speaker 1: seem like people were kind of being pushed to take
Speaker 1: that risk for reasons they didn't fully understand or in
Speaker 1: a situation they didn't fully grock you know, yeah, which
Speaker 1: which gets at one of the things that when I
Speaker 1: talk about how I think this is the biggest problem,
Speaker 1: not not the cannon fodder issue, but the getting people
Speaker 1: involved is the biggest issue I think we currently face
Speaker 1: because there's so many people who want to be involved
Speaker 1: right now, because the world is even worse than usual
Speaker 1: and um and it's hitting groups of people who haven't
Speaker 1: been hit by before. And people are often also looking
Speaker 1: for a sense of community. And there's a thing that
Speaker 1: people we don't talk about enough when people are getting involved.
Speaker 1: There's two different reasons people get involved, and both are
Speaker 1: entirely valid, and one is to fix things and another
Speaker 1: is to find to break of the isolation that they
Speaker 1: live in in their daily lives. Um and we need
Speaker 1: to be aware of that when we talk about how
Speaker 1: to onboard people, and we need to be aware about that.
Speaker 1: If you are getting involved, you should think about your
Speaker 1: own desires. Are you looking for community and if so,
Speaker 1: you can find it within radical action, right. Um. But
Speaker 1: if you are doing that, then you especially need to
Speaker 1: be on guard against peer pressure because it's a really
Speaker 1: easy way to feel like you're involved with things is
Speaker 1: to go hang out with people who are all doing
Speaker 1: a really scary thing. And and that's beautiful. And I
Speaker 1: absolutely did that when I when I first got involved
Speaker 1: in anarchism, I I and politics in general. I I
Speaker 1: joined in head first, and you know, spend a night
Speaker 1: in jail within the first couple of months, and I
Speaker 1: don't have any particular regrets about that. And I found
Speaker 1: community in a way that I had never had in
Speaker 1: my life because of how isolated our society is. But
Speaker 1: that's not the only reason to to go do these
Speaker 1: and that is I mean, I think a lot of
Speaker 1: people experienced that last year during the George Floyd protests.
Speaker 1: It's the kind of I mean, it's the thing we've
Speaker 1: talked about on in the first season. If it could
Speaker 1: happen here that times like that this war does this too,
Speaker 1: can actually provide meaning that that people have lacked. And
Speaker 1: a lot of it is that community that like community
Speaker 1: of sufferers, the trauma bonding um that feels like the
Speaker 1: most important thing, even because maybe it is the most
Speaker 1: important thing you've ever done. I think in a lot
Speaker 1: of cases it is. Um. But that's also mind altering
Speaker 1: and it um. It can lead to situations that are
Speaker 1: not entirely dissimilar to cults. UM. I'm not saying that
Speaker 1: they are cults, because cults are number one. With cult
Speaker 1: there's generally going to be like a leader and a
Speaker 1: in such but like, there are things that happened that
Speaker 1: that draw people into cults that are just human things,
Speaker 1: their aspects in some cases, as I've said before, of
Speaker 1: like a good party, um. But there are cults like
Speaker 1: aspects to the kind of groups that form in these
Speaker 1: traumatic situations that can lead people to start making really
Speaker 1: poor decisions. UM. And and so you have to really
Speaker 1: you always have to be kind of analyzing not just
Speaker 1: what you're doing, but what's going on in your own head,
Speaker 1: in the head of the heads of the people around you. UM.
Speaker 1: That's that's just always important. But I think particularly when
Speaker 1: you're when you're trying to do something new and different
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways, bigger than anything you've done before.
Speaker 1: Do you have any specific advice for like kind of
Speaker 1: avoiding the cults of personality that sometimes form in new organizations. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you have both informal and formal structures can both
Speaker 1: cause problems with cult of personality. There are these brilliant
Speaker 1: essays that I haven't read like twenty years that come
Speaker 1: from the feminist movement, and one of them is called
Speaker 1: the Tyranny of structural Lessness. And as best as I remember,
Speaker 1: these are very short essays. As best I remember, the
Speaker 1: Tyranny of structurallessness says, if you don't have a formal
Speaker 1: structure in your organization, you're going to have this informal
Speaker 1: leader who basically tells everyone to do and that's a
Speaker 1: problem and and it's a very important piece, and I
Speaker 1: believe it comes from a Marxist feminist perspective, but I'm
Speaker 1: not certain. And then there was an anarchist feminist response
Speaker 1: around the same time, maybe I'm not sure, called the
Speaker 1: Tyranny of tyranny that was like, yes, that's true. And
Speaker 1: also when you have a formal structure and put someone
Speaker 1: in charge there in charge, and that has other problems too.
Speaker 1: And I think that it's just we we have to
Speaker 1: be aware of both of these things. That, um, you
Speaker 1: know the fact that most movements are very decentralized in
Speaker 1: grassroots as as huge advantages, right, but it does have
Speaker 1: problems of causing informal cults of personality. Um. Podcasting is
Speaker 1: a big part of this problem. Um. And actually, I
Speaker 1: really appreciate that you're not an organizer like frankly, And
Speaker 1: it's part of why I'm not an organizer on some
Speaker 1: level is because when people read the books that someone
Speaker 1: writes or listen to someone's voice all the time, it
Speaker 1: is very influential, right, And being aware of that and
Speaker 1: therefore not exerting that power is a very good thing. Um.
Speaker 1: And but there's okay, so the other thing, like when
Speaker 1: I worry about like people getting involved with like don't
Speaker 1: get peer pressured into stuff when you first join. There's
Speaker 1: also this thing that is needs to be talked about
Speaker 1: and maybe I'll have talked about this some previously, but entrapment.
Speaker 1: Entrapment is a huge problem, and specifically the FEDS tend
Speaker 1: to look for young idealist activists who can be peer
Speaker 1: pressured into actions that they may or may not have
Speaker 1: otherwise ideologically agreed with, like hey, let's go blow up
Speaker 1: a bridge or let's go blow up a damn and
Speaker 1: and this doesn't just happen to the left. It happens
Speaker 1: m oh, yeah, it's all around. Yeah for sure. Like
Speaker 1: there's that case of the guys who are trying to
Speaker 1: kidnap the governor of was it Michigan. A lot of
Speaker 1: that was informants who were there's a lot there's You
Speaker 1: can debate heavily whether or not it was entrapment. Obviously,
Speaker 1: what we we might consider entrapment morally often isn't entrapment
Speaker 1: legally because the FBI does know where the lines are legally,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't mean it isn't morally entrapment, right, And
Speaker 1: they do that a lot, and they usually succeed um, well,
Speaker 1: they may not usually succeeded, though they usually succeeded the case,
Speaker 1: and entrapment defenses are hard to succeed with. And so really,
Speaker 1: just like an thinking about it, I think developing your
Speaker 1: own moral compass and sticking to it is one of
Speaker 1: the single most important things that a new activist can
Speaker 1: can do. And not to be afraid of radical action
Speaker 1: necessarily like militant action, but but be wary of it.
Speaker 1: Um But then again, I mean in terms of like
Speaker 1: being wary of what the other thing to avoid doing
Speaker 1: is like accusing each other like fed jacketing, like being like, oh,
Speaker 1: well that person is doing the same thing a FED
Speaker 1: might do, like wink wink. You know. Um, it's a
Speaker 1: really complicated an annoying game to play, and if you're
Speaker 1: just getting involved, you're gonna have to learn how to
Speaker 1: get it play this game of not fed jacketing and
Speaker 1: also not um falling into stuff. And it's annoying because
Speaker 1: you probably have to kind of learn some of the stuff,
Speaker 1: even if all you want to do is give away blankets.
Speaker 1: You know, if you want to tie what you're doing
Speaker 1: to a larger ideological structure, then it's going to come
Speaker 1: up that you need to be aware of how repression
Speaker 1: applies to that larger ideological structure. Yeah, like all this
Speaker 1: is very useful specifically if you're trying to find something
Speaker 1: kind of pre existing um or you know, looking you know,
Speaker 1: or you know, starting something in the bigger city where
Speaker 1: you have like connections can be made to other existing organizations.
Speaker 1: And I'm trying to think, you know, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of people who live in more like rural areas. It's
Speaker 1: not much like a liberal or like, you know, especially
Speaker 1: left is kind of slubculture. How would how would you
Speaker 1: recommend people who live in those kind of scenarios try
Speaker 1: to start building this community. Woudn't say like they only
Speaker 1: have like a few friends? Um, what what steps do
Speaker 1: you think people can take if they have more, you know,
Speaker 1: a secluded set up? So it is harder. And I
Speaker 1: live in a red area close to a blue area, right,
Speaker 1: And I do most of my organizing and as much
Speaker 1: as I do organizing within the the nearby small hippie city,
Speaker 1: even though theoretically the thing that I care the most
Speaker 1: about is connections to my immediate neighbors. Right. Um, that
Speaker 1: is harder, And it is harder for a lot of
Speaker 1: different reasons, especially if you have cultural differences between you
Speaker 1: and the people that you're around. Right, Like I'm a
Speaker 1: trans woman and I've live around a lot of like
Speaker 1: farms and stuff, right And and previously this wasn't a
Speaker 1: problem before Trump, This what kind just wasn't a problem
Speaker 1: after Trump. Now, all of a sudden, the fact that
Speaker 1: I'm trans as like an attack against people in a
Speaker 1: way that it never used to be. And and so
Speaker 1: now they all have an opinion about the fact that
Speaker 1: we're an address. But still at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: I would say that most of the people that I'm
Speaker 1: around are actually totally chill. Like there's a vocal minority
Speaker 1: of really horrid people, right, um. But even the people
Speaker 1: who might be and might have even like voted for
Speaker 1: Trump or whatever, um, are not necessarily, at least along
Speaker 1: my own identity lines. Also white are not necessarily going
Speaker 1: to give me ship. And you know, I can go
Speaker 1: talk to them in address and they might be sort
Speaker 1: of confused, and they might not be. But if you
Speaker 1: have more culturally in common with the people around you,
Speaker 1: then there is a lot of room that you can
Speaker 1: start working on from there. And this actually ties into
Speaker 1: something that I think applies to people across the board,
Speaker 1: which is we have this especially new activists, but also
Speaker 1: including people who've been in it for a long time.
Speaker 1: And this like real arrogance about the fact that we're
Speaker 1: like right, And when you want to change the world,
Speaker 1: you need a certain amount of arrogance, need a certain
Speaker 1: amount of like I mean, I literally believe we need
Speaker 1: to not have a government or capitalism, and these are
Speaker 1: very major changes to our existing structure, just a huge
Speaker 1: amount of arrogance to that. Although not having a government
Speaker 1: is slightly less of a major change now than it
Speaker 1: was a couple of years ago. It's true, and also
Speaker 1: like something like sometimes, actually it's funny. I used that
Speaker 1: it more in common with these neighbors, but then all
Speaker 1: the libertarians went, goddamn authoritarian. That bummed the funk out
Speaker 1: of me. Yeah, there's there's some good ones still. There's
Speaker 1: like again, there's the there's the there's the taking your
Speaker 1: private plane and do a disaster area libertarians and God
Speaker 1: bless him totally, And you know, they're like, they just
Speaker 1: don't want them. You know. It's like my dad is
Speaker 1: sort of on the libertarian side of things and keeps
Speaker 1: twenty dollar bills and the visor of his truck to
Speaker 1: give to people flying signs, and he just doesn't want
Speaker 1: the government redistributing his money. He doesn't mind redistributing his money. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I'm like, all right, I don't have any real
Speaker 1: objection to that. He's also no longer anyway. If you
Speaker 1: come at people with this attitude of like I'm right
Speaker 1: and you're wrong, the kind of people that you can
Speaker 1: get to join your side by saying I'm right and
Speaker 1: you're wrong are not the people you want. You want
Speaker 1: people who challenge authority, including the authority of people who
Speaker 1: claim there should be authority, and and so just actually
Speaker 1: listening to people and like hearing people out and um,
Speaker 1: when possible, avoiding drawing lines between people is one of
Speaker 1: the main ways to connect with people across either cultural
Speaker 1: divides or especially political divides. And this this can't always happen, right,
Speaker 1: Like I walk down the street and address and someone
Speaker 1: like called me a bad word, Like I'm not going
Speaker 1: to be like, I understand why you think to call
Speaker 1: me that, And I understand how like me dressed this
Speaker 1: way kind of challenges your sense of masculinity that you've
Speaker 1: been brought up into is the only way that you
Speaker 1: can hold yourself strong in a very hard world. No,
Speaker 1: I don't do that. I um scream funck you and
Speaker 1: chase them. Um, I would ever chase anyone with a knife.
Speaker 1: I think that's not legal, So I wouldn't do that,
Speaker 1: but um, you know that might work. And you know,
Speaker 1: like fun those people, I don't care what they have
Speaker 1: to say. No, of course not. And it when I
Speaker 1: think one of the things that I don't know twitter
Speaker 1: brain has done is that like when you when you
Speaker 1: talk about reaching out and talking to people who you know,
Speaker 1: don't agree with you, aren't aren't on your side ideologically,
Speaker 1: there's folks who will kind of assume, like, oh, so
Speaker 1: you're saying I should like try to be friendly with
Speaker 1: people who would have murder me. Like, No, I'm not
Speaker 1: saying that. I'm not saying that, like, as a transperson
Speaker 1: or black person, you should go talk to um, a
Speaker 1: militant anti LGBT activist or a fucking klansman or something.
Speaker 1: I'm saying that, like, that's not within the broad I'm
Speaker 1: saying what you need to recognize. But what I think
Speaker 1: is important to recognize, especially if you're when we talk
Speaker 1: about like post you know, collapse or whatever, is that
Speaker 1: within broad political tendency. So I'm not talking about like
Speaker 1: fascist or whatever, but I'm talking about like liberal, role conservative, progressive,
Speaker 1: very broad political tendencies. You have roughly the same percentage
Speaker 1: of people who are ship. So in an anarchist group,
Speaker 1: the amount of people who are shitty is going to
Speaker 1: be similar to the amount of the general population that
Speaker 1: are shitty. It's the same with every political tendency. But
Speaker 1: the corollary to that is, again within broad tendencies, you'll
Speaker 1: find roughly the same amount of people who are basically
Speaker 1: rad and maybe yeah, there's some they have their brain
Speaker 1: got poisoned with dis info and they believe some stupid
Speaker 1: shit and they vote like an asshole. But you know,
Speaker 1: they'll stop their car if they see someone in an accident,
Speaker 1: and they keep a fucking medical kit in their bag,
Speaker 1: and you know there that it's the it's the it's
Speaker 1: the ship that you know. I talk a lot about this,
Speaker 1: the stabbing on the Portland Max train. Well, the two
Speaker 1: people who who died confronting that asshole. Um, we're a
Speaker 1: republican retired veteran and a far left social justice activist
Speaker 1: and they both you know, put their bodies on the lines.
Speaker 1: I think that like when we talk about like being
Speaker 1: willing to kind of talk with people who are who
Speaker 1: are not on the same ideological boat as you, that's
Speaker 1: that's what I mean. Not you should make nice with
Speaker 1: the people who want to exterminate you, like suck those people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because the thing you're looking for, the thing I'm looking
Speaker 1: for is the Republican who's going to, hopefully, instead of
Speaker 1: dying to saw alongside me, successfully defeat the you know,
Speaker 1: actual far right person. But yeah, yeah, totally and and
Speaker 1: I think that that actually is part of the It's
Speaker 1: not always the answer for every person who's isolated, right,
Speaker 1: everyone who's socially isolated, but it is part of it.
Speaker 1: If you're trying to organize with people where you say
Speaker 1: you're the only leftist or the only anarchist in your area,
Speaker 1: then maybe you don't start. And this is actually funny.
Speaker 1: I'm very into being very public about my political ideology
Speaker 1: so that people know what bias is UM coming into
Speaker 1: things with. But but maybe you don't start your rural
Speaker 1: Mutuo aid project calling it the Rural Mutuo Aid Project,
Speaker 1: or maybe you do, and maybe you you just start
Speaker 1: doing it and you find people who are willing to
Speaker 1: have the same goals and means as you, and and
Speaker 1: I think you can do alongside of that, you can
Speaker 1: also just be really public about what you believe. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, um again, as an anarchist, I end up
Speaker 1: working with like church groups and things that I don't
Speaker 1: necessarily agree with on a lot of a lot of things.
Speaker 1: But they're not mad when I'm like, oh, I'm an anarchist,
Speaker 1: They're just like, huh, okay, I'm a church person or
Speaker 1: what you know, and like Okay, I'm not. I don't
Speaker 1: expect different of them, and they don't expect different of me.
Speaker 1: And we we know what we have in common and
Speaker 1: what we don't to a certain degree, and then we
Speaker 1: work on what we have in common and so airing
Speaker 1: and so this is both true if you're within the
Speaker 1: movement and you're hoping to try and solve this problem
Speaker 1: for other people. But I also think it's going to
Speaker 1: be true for people who are trying to build things
Speaker 1: in areas where they don't have, where they don't feel
Speaker 1: like the part of something larger is airing on the
Speaker 1: side of inclusion versus exclusion and not And like you're
Speaker 1: talking about, it's about airing on the side of not
Speaker 1: always include everyone, not always committing to a hard and
Speaker 1: fast rules out. Yeah, totally. Yeah, be be open to
Speaker 1: the fact that people can surprise you in ways that
Speaker 1: aren't terrifying. Yeah. Also, because you get terrified enough by
Speaker 1: enough like people who you think are on your side
Speaker 1: that you're like, oh, yeah, I'm sad you all don'to
Speaker 1: the the ad pivots in this show, because you can
Speaker 1: do it. We can do it, we can yea, we
Speaker 1: can cut it in During one of the long awkward pauses.
Speaker 1: Go for it, and we'll keep all this up to
Speaker 1: it in, but we'll actually cut the actual so you'll
Speaker 1: hear it. It's like Finnigan's Wake. You're going to hear
Speaker 1: it out of order, okay, And I hopefully you all
Speaker 1: be able to figure out the second half of it,
Speaker 1: but the first. The first half is anyone who claims
Speaker 1: to have all the answers is selling you something. Oh
Speaker 1: uh huh yeah, oh oh you know who else is
Speaker 1: selling you something? Is that the ads go listen to
Speaker 1: the Guico Geico or or Jesus. We've had some bad
Speaker 1: ones lately. Um, there's that s os Cuba show that
Speaker 1: sounds we're rough. Uh. There was that one that was
Speaker 1: just like God. It was just like this is the
Speaker 1: concept of we are sponsored by God. I think I've
Speaker 1: gotten like Walmart and McDonald's on your show before. Remember
Speaker 1: it's the people's food. Oh yeah, organized actually try to
Speaker 1: organize around the Walmart. That could be very so. Anyway,
Speaker 1: here's ads. If someone is trying to start something new
Speaker 1: inside one of these more secluded areas and like they
Speaker 1: have decided like yeah, I'm willing to do something. I'm
Speaker 1: willing to actually just like start it. How how would
Speaker 1: you recommend they try to figure out what some of
Speaker 1: the like biggest needs of the community are that they
Speaker 1: can actually tackle, Like how how does someone find out
Speaker 1: what to do with their mutual aid because they can
Speaker 1: like commit like, yeah, I can do something around supply,
Speaker 1: something around this, you know, whatever we like. How does
Speaker 1: one try to actually gauge what is trying to tackle?
Speaker 1: I guess it depends on whether you feel like you're
Speaker 1: totally Like if in my head, if I'm totally inside
Speaker 1: a nun Assie community, but an area, right, I probably
Speaker 1: kind of know because I'm also experiencing whatever the thing is.
Speaker 1: But if I'm if I'm a little bit detached from it,
Speaker 1: then I do need to like do kind of you know.
Speaker 1: The sort of traditional method is I think it's called
Speaker 1: listening projects. I've never actually personally done a listening project.
Speaker 1: I've been around many people who do. Where you basically
Speaker 1: like sometimes you go door to door and you're like, hey,
Speaker 1: what's up, Like what do you need? Like what's going on?
Speaker 1: You know? Um, But like say, for example, in the
Speaker 1: area that I live, there is a a rural organizing.
Speaker 1: It's not the actual rural organizing project, which is a
Speaker 1: specific structure. But there is a rural mutual aid group
Speaker 1: in the largely red area that I live in that's
Speaker 1: run by by leftists and they, I think that largely
Speaker 1: they did a lot of like firewood delivery, for example,
Speaker 1: because a lot of the areas around here are heated
Speaker 1: by woodstove. And you have a lot of poverty in
Speaker 1: rural areas. And of course poverty looks very different in
Speaker 1: rural areas versus urban areas. And you know, one of
Speaker 1: the advantages of being rural poor. There's many disadvantages, like
Speaker 1: lack of access to certain types of services, right, Um,
Speaker 1: But one of the sometimes advantages of rural poverty, as
Speaker 1: I understand it, I'm not specifically an expert, um, is
Speaker 1: do you have space? Right? You just don't have stuff
Speaker 1: for money, and so you can have stuff if people
Speaker 1: give you stuff, so you can like story your firewood
Speaker 1: and so. And then also because it's this very specific
Speaker 1: tangible thing, people can get really excited about, like, oh,
Speaker 1: I can chop firewood, or maybe even I can't chop
Speaker 1: firewood because my legs busted because I work in the
Speaker 1: paper mill or whatever, but I can. But I got
Speaker 1: a trailer on my truck, you know, um, and I
Speaker 1: can haul that. And people get really excited when there's
Speaker 1: like things that they specifically are good at, especially things
Speaker 1: that I kind of have alienated them from other people
Speaker 1: that they're that they're good at, that they can then
Speaker 1: participate in. And so, which isn't totally answer your question,
Speaker 1: but I would say if anyone specifically is in a
Speaker 1: rural situation is looking to start a mutual a group,
Speaker 1: look at the Rural Organizing Project. Yes, I don't believe
Speaker 1: that they specifically do rural mutual aid organizing, but they
Speaker 1: talk a lot about what it means to be an
Speaker 1: organizer within areas that are largely controlled by the far right,
Speaker 1: but are not. It's not like the people are all
Speaker 1: far right, they're just controlled by the far right, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the people actually there, once you talk to them, might
Speaker 1: actually be a lot more reasonable than like the media
Speaker 1: influencers who are part of this you know, same thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it is. It is one of those things. This
Speaker 1: is a topic we're drifting too. But it's when we
Speaker 1: drift to regularly on this show, we're like, when I
Speaker 1: talk with conservatives, it's it's not uncommon that I can
Speaker 1: without especially if I don't start by mentioning anarchy, I
Speaker 1: can get them to agree to a lot of the
Speaker 1: things I believe, which is like, yeah, maybe people don't
Speaker 1: need to be governed. Maybe that doesn't work out good.
Speaker 1: Maybe uh, politicians are corrupt and should have less power,
Speaker 1: And like that doesn't mean that you're gonna you're gonna
Speaker 1: get them on the barricades with you. Um, because any
Speaker 1: productive kind of relationship starts from like a base of
Speaker 1: shared interests and it's not a useless endeavor to engage
Speaker 1: in kind of trying to subtly. You know, if you
Speaker 1: if you feel out people around you who are ideologically
Speaker 1: not particularly similar to you, but also decent people, Um,
Speaker 1: you can kind of try and work in some some
Speaker 1: something you've not not just some common ground, but you
Speaker 1: can try and get them to see that they agree
Speaker 1: with you one more than they think, um, and that
Speaker 1: that has an effect of changing the way people think
Speaker 1: about the world. It really does. Yeah, and you but
Speaker 1: you also have to go into it open to yes,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe it's not going to change your opinion about
Speaker 1: the way the economy should be structured or the way
Speaker 1: that sure works, right, but you know, you definitely have
Speaker 1: to go into it with a I can now understand
Speaker 1: why you drive a big pickup truck that burns a
Speaker 1: lot of gas or whatever whatever thing. You might be
Speaker 1: coming into it thinking yeah, or at least it might
Speaker 1: help you understand why they believe or do certain things
Speaker 1: outside of you know, Dave Reuben broke their brain because
Speaker 1: they got on YouTube at the wrong time. I don't know, Margaret,
Speaker 1: did you have anything else you wanted to really get into.
Speaker 1: I guess to. One of the other questions that you
Speaker 1: all brought up was about preparedness, like maybe kind of
Speaker 1: almost in the inverse situation where let's say that you
Speaker 1: live in a small apartment and you want to be
Speaker 1: prepared and in which case maybe you have better access
Speaker 1: to community. Maybe you don't write a lot of people
Speaker 1: who live in the city are just as isolated socially
Speaker 1: as people elsewhere, But at least you kind of have,
Speaker 1: like there's a little bit more easy access to ways
Speaker 1: to break out of certain types of isolation if you
Speaker 1: put work into it, because there's more likely to be
Speaker 1: groups around that are that are public that you can
Speaker 1: go interface with. Um. But in terms of like actual preparedness,
Speaker 1: you have the inverse problem, right of if you live
Speaker 1: rural you might have room to store beans and rice,
Speaker 1: and if you live in the city you might not write. Um,
Speaker 1: but I I will say it's the other thing that
Speaker 1: I find people The two things that people talk to
Speaker 1: me about I think you all run into also is
Speaker 1: that people are either I don't have any community or
Speaker 1: I don't have any money in space. Yeah. And so
Speaker 1: if you don't have any money in space, I mean,
Speaker 1: I mean in some ways, it's like, well, maybe your
Speaker 1: focus isn't like stockpiling stuff. Stockpiling and stuff is like
Speaker 1: the single most overrated part of individual or community preparedness. Um.
Speaker 1: I mean I do it, but you know it's because
Speaker 1: I M my brain works that way. Um. But also
Speaker 1: the level of like stuff that you might be looking
Speaker 1: for might be a lot less than like, like you know,
Speaker 1: it's like prepper media is filled with like here's how
Speaker 1: to build a bunk or under your pool, and I'm like, what, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's so many levels mean, somebody other things that
Speaker 1: you should be doing before you go to that stitch. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, like, don't get me wrong, if I had
Speaker 1: a pool, I'd be stoked. And if I had absolutely,
Speaker 1: I'd be even more stoked. I'd be so happy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But but you know what it's like, it's the first
Speaker 1: five gallon bucket of like dried food you store is
Speaker 1: far and away more important than the tent, right, and like,
Speaker 1: so just having a five gallon jerry can ful of
Speaker 1: water so that you're like, you know, what, if the
Speaker 1: water turns off or we have a boil advisory, which
Speaker 1: happens all the time, I'm good for a couple of days, right,
Speaker 1: Because most of the time people think about preparedness as like,
Speaker 1: I'm preparing for the end times, and usually what it
Speaker 1: is is the end times are real slow and chunky
Speaker 1: and crumbles, that's the word. Um. And so you're just
Speaker 1: really looking to like smooth out interruptions, and a lot
Speaker 1: of that can be done very cheaply and honestly, when
Speaker 1: when you start storing your fifth five gallon jerry can
Speaker 1: of water, you're not storying it for you anymore. You're
Speaker 1: storying it for your neighbor. Yea, yeah, And that's good,
Speaker 1: but not exactly not the first step, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's better to prepare for if you have like
Speaker 1: a week's worth of power outages or a week's worth
Speaker 1: of the water not working right, And those are more
Speaker 1: incremental steps because we're not just gonna drop off and
Speaker 1: have no water forever starting in a month, right, Probably not,
Speaker 1: but we mean very like there's gonna be there's enough
Speaker 1: remaining systems that that they want to fix it. You know,
Speaker 1: it's more likely that some some disasters gonna happen that
Speaker 1: we're gonna have, you know, a week worth of stuff gone,
Speaker 1: you know, and that's the thing that's actually more more
Speaker 1: reasonable to prep for. Yeah, that makes sense. Um, well, Margaret,
Speaker 1: where can Where can the good people and hopefully not
Speaker 1: the bad people, but statistically some of them will suck
Speaker 1: find you? Um, the good people can find me on
Speaker 1: I have a podcast called Like the World Is Dying,
Speaker 1: which they can listen to you on if they would like,
Speaker 1: and it's about individual community preparedness. I also am on
Speaker 1: Twitter way too much, at Magpie kill Joy, Instagram, at
Speaker 1: Margaret Killjoy, my websites Birds before the Storm dot net
Speaker 1: or Margaret Killjoy dot com and that has like a
Speaker 1: list of all the books that I have out And
Speaker 1: I have a new book, an old book being reissued
Speaker 1: that is coming out in November from a k Press.
Speaker 1: The book is called A Country of Ghosts and it's
Speaker 1: an anarchist utopian book because I was sick of people
Speaker 1: being like but how would an anarchist society work? And
Speaker 1: I was like, you know what, I wrote a book,
Speaker 1: damn straight. Um. It also has a plot, so it's
Speaker 1: not fancy kind of bougie with yours. If you write
Speaker 1: a plot, you get the wall. Plots allowed only post
Speaker 1: structural literature. Well, okay, so this has actually happened to
Speaker 1: anarchist fiction writers before Buds of Mara was this anarchist
Speaker 1: fiction writer. Um oh, I can't remember where from I'm
Speaker 1: gonna this is terribly embarrassing. But he moved to England
Speaker 1: from a colonized African country. Uma, what did Rhodesia become?
Speaker 1: This is the most embarrassing. So it became a Zimbabwe right, Okay? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so he was from there and then everyone and he
Speaker 1: moved to London until he realized that they're a bunch
Speaker 1: of racists and he would like breaksh it at awards
Speaker 1: ceremonies and then go back home. But he was a
Speaker 1: squatter for a while in the eighties, but he wasn't
Speaker 1: writing in the proper post colonial like Marxist realist tradition,
Speaker 1: because instead he was writing postmodern fiction, which is stuck,
Speaker 1: get it and terrible. So he just like was like,
Speaker 1: I don't care, and so he's great. That is that
Speaker 1: is anyway, I love to see it. Um, that's the episode.
Speaker 1: That's the episode go out and right, postmodern destruc jump
Speaker 1: on a train. But that too, Yeah, probably also a
Speaker 1: bad idea. I talked to somebody who lost their legs
Speaker 1: doing that once. Anyway, episodes over welcome this is it
Speaker 1: could happen here daily. Uh. This week we are focusing
Speaker 1: on different ways to actually start doing things. You know,
Speaker 1: we've talked a lot about ideas, and we like you know,
Speaker 1: made some broad recommendations um and you know, had people
Speaker 1: on to give specific insights and you know, different things.
Speaker 1: But we're trying to focus this week and then you
Speaker 1: know more in the future. Is like, if you're brand
Speaker 1: new to this sort of thing, how to actually start
Speaker 1: doing stuff. And one of the things we talked about
Speaker 1: a lot is a lot of almost everyone we've interviewed
Speaker 1: has mentioned us at some point that trying to get
Speaker 1: more active in the things you're consuming and the things
Speaker 1: that you're eating. And one of the ways to do
Speaker 1: that is by just literally growing your own food. I
Speaker 1: went when I was growing up, I mean my grandparents operate,
Speaker 1: I mean like they stop right like like like like
Speaker 1: a large, large farm. Now they operate kind of like
Speaker 1: a farm that just like feeds them. So whenever I'm
Speaker 1: at my grandparents in Canada, usually we you know, we
Speaker 1: just eat all the food they grow, whether that be
Speaker 1: like produce. Um. They also do like their own hunting,
Speaker 1: They make their own sausage, like you know, they preserve meats.
Speaker 1: So like, I kind of grew up around this type
Speaker 1: of thing because just how self reliant some of my
Speaker 1: family is. But not everyone may have this kind of background,
Speaker 1: and so you know, this idea of growing your own
Speaker 1: food can feel maybe a little bit daunting. Um. And
Speaker 1: to help us talk about food and then eventually soil
Speaker 1: and other kind of things, I have invited a guest
Speaker 1: on from another kind of podcast in this that operates
Speaker 1: in the same rough, rough framework, I would say, probably
Speaker 1: are how to how to kind of slowly improve improve
Speaker 1: the world? Um uh do I won't explain who you
Speaker 1: are and what's your what your what your project is? Sure?
Speaker 1: So my name is Andy. I'm the post of The
Speaker 1: Poor Pole's Almanac. We're a podcast that's focused on thinking
Speaker 1: about after collapse, how do we things like climate change
Speaker 1: and collapse impact things like food systems, and what can
Speaker 1: we do today to prepare for what's coming in the future. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like it's not not a coincidence that all
Speaker 1: of these different kind of projects are getting more popular
Speaker 1: around the same time, because we're looking at the world
Speaker 1: and being like, huh, this doesn't seem very sustainable, so
Speaker 1: we better we better start figuring out what to do
Speaker 1: with all these systems kind of slowly, you know, start
Speaker 1: losing parts. I want to talk about kind of food today.
Speaker 1: I want to want to maybe branch off into like
Speaker 1: a few different directions. Branch that's a plant plant plant
Speaker 1: pun um, what a branch off in a few different directions,
Speaker 1: both like you know, what do you do if you
Speaker 1: have like your own house and yard, or maybe you're
Speaker 1: like more ruled you have lots of space, and then
Speaker 1: also kind of the inverse of like let's say you
Speaker 1: lived in, like I don know, a cramped city apartment.
Speaker 1: Different things that you can do. Let's probably start with
Speaker 1: like the rule just to like give a you know,
Speaker 1: a more like base background. You know, you have more
Speaker 1: of like a standard set up for what you're able
Speaker 1: to do. If someone's never grown anything before, they've never
Speaker 1: like maybe they've had like one house plant, but like
Speaker 1: they've never grown anything. What what do you think is
Speaker 1: the best first like preparation steps before you actually you know,
Speaker 1: go and start buying seeds and stuff. Sure, so when
Speaker 1: it comes to growing food, it's really not that complicated.
Speaker 1: Chances are if you have a front yard we're talking
Speaker 1: about someplace that's pretty rural, assuming that climate is in
Speaker 1: someplace super dry, you're generally going to be thinking about
Speaker 1: growing food someplace where grass probably already grows. So if
Speaker 1: grass is already grown there, you know things can grow there.
Speaker 1: And really that's that's as simple as it can be.
Speaker 1: It can be more complicated. We can start talking about
Speaker 1: things like soil pH and nutrients and all of these
Speaker 1: other things, but really, when it comes down to it,
Speaker 1: if you put a seed in the ground and the
Speaker 1: temperature is not too warm or cold, and it gets
Speaker 1: rained but not too much rain, the plant's going to grow.
Speaker 1: And if you've got some say a couple of acres,
Speaker 1: and you want to cut out a little section of
Speaker 1: it to grow some food. Uh that that's as simple
Speaker 1: as it really can be. And you can go to
Speaker 1: whatever store and buy seats. So like that, that's a
Speaker 1: good place to start. And obviously depending on where you live,
Speaker 1: you want to think about things like lead in the
Speaker 1: in the soil if you live someplace near an old house,
Speaker 1: or maybe if you're near some place where there was manufacturing.
Speaker 1: And one of the things to keep in mind is
Speaker 1: that a lot of older settlements, even if there isn't
Speaker 1: a factory there now, it's very possible there was a
Speaker 1: factory years ago it's been demoed and you never even
Speaker 1: knew was there. So it's really important if you do
Speaker 1: live in someplace that has that manufacturing background or an
Speaker 1: old house to really check for things like lead in
Speaker 1: the soil because that can be really dangerous. And there's yeah,
Speaker 1: a very accessible like soil testing kits available that stares
Speaker 1: on online. Okay, yeah, it's like I think fifteen dollars.
Speaker 1: You can have soil sample taken and you can find
Speaker 1: out everything that's in it, just like the pH and
Speaker 1: you know if it's too acidic and things like that.
Speaker 1: So yeah, you you figure out you want to you
Speaker 1: want to start growing stuff you have you have some space,
Speaker 1: whether it be like a front yard or maybe like
Speaker 1: even like an open field if you're lucky, Um, what
Speaker 1: kind of what kind of stuff do you think? You know?
Speaker 1: Should I just jump in and buy any kind of
Speaker 1: seed that looks fun, or should I like start with
Speaker 1: specific things. I don't know. It's like if I really
Speaker 1: like potatoes, or just go to potatoes, if I really
Speaker 1: like cauliflowers, just to cauliflower. What's kind of the if
Speaker 1: I'm brand new, what's the different things that would be
Speaker 1: wor first drawing out? So generally speaking, you really want
Speaker 1: to think about what your climate is and I think
Speaker 1: that's one of the things that gets missed a lot
Speaker 1: of times as you want to grow things. So like
Speaker 1: I live in New England, growing say, watermelon is really
Speaker 1: a challenge in a lot of ways because you have
Speaker 1: to think about the length of my season versus the
Speaker 1: length it takes for a watermelon to be a full
Speaker 1: sized fruit for you to eat. So depending on where
Speaker 1: you live, the one thing you need to keep in
Speaker 1: mind is what that length of your season is. Now,
Speaker 1: to get back to the main subject that the podcast
Speaker 1: talking about, things like climate change and collapse. That season
Speaker 1: is changing rapidly. Right now. We're adding days, so the
Speaker 1: seasons are getting longer, but also we're having weird cold
Speaker 1: snaps later and later into spring, so what might have
Speaker 1: been a traditional season no longer really applies anymore. So
Speaker 1: if you're thinking about this is your first year, you
Speaker 1: don't want to grow anything that might be right at
Speaker 1: the cusp of um being in your season, Or you
Speaker 1: don't want to are plant inside and then have to
Speaker 1: move it outside and you have to know whether or
Speaker 1: not it has a tap root and all these other
Speaker 1: things to make sure that you don't damage the plant.
Speaker 1: Then you definitely want to grow something with a shorter season,
Speaker 1: things like um. Cold weather plants, lettuces, broccolis, cauliflowers, things
Speaker 1: like that will generally do pretty good in short seasons,
Speaker 1: but they don't really do well in really warm climates.
Speaker 1: So if you're in say Florida, it's gonna be really
Speaker 1: difficult UM. But that that's kind of how you want
Speaker 1: to start thinking about those processes. Learning what the cold
Speaker 1: season plants are, what the warm season plants are, where
Speaker 1: you fit in in terms of the zone that you
Speaker 1: live within, and again starting to think about Okay, the
Speaker 1: last couple of years, when did we get the last frost?
Speaker 1: Because it's not what it might say ten years ago
Speaker 1: is your average last frost, Those days are pretty much gone.
Speaker 1: I know here in Portland we're currently growing a lot
Speaker 1: of potatoes and that's been that's been kind of our
Speaker 1: our our big haul. Also, tomatoes did very good this year,
Speaker 1: particularly because of our big heat domes they got we
Speaker 1: got the tomatoes did so much better than what they
Speaker 1: what they usually do. We've like canned so many tomatoes
Speaker 1: just because we just we have so many more than
Speaker 1: what we're used to that I do find that interesting,
Speaker 1: being like, you know, climate change obviously being generally a
Speaker 1: net bad, but you know, in some cases for growing
Speaker 1: it's gonna make certain crops easier to grow, but you know,
Speaker 1: other crops will be harder to grow. It's something I
Speaker 1: wanted to talk more about in the first five heavily
Speaker 1: scripted It could happen here season two episodes. It's like,
Speaker 1: particularly how different growing regions are going to shift up
Speaker 1: and how like you know, Canada for instance, is going
Speaker 1: to have a lot more agriculture in the next years
Speaker 1: just because so many, so many climates are slowly inching upwards.
Speaker 1: But you know, even in places like Georgia and other
Speaker 1: places where different if we know specific plants are growing,
Speaker 1: all that stuff is gonna be changing. Obviously, this is
Speaker 1: affecting coffee and how we're getting less and less it's
Speaker 1: based and land that's actually able to grow coffee because
Speaker 1: basically plants, you know, growers have to move their plants
Speaker 1: up a mountain every year in order to make the
Speaker 1: coffee actually work, which is why it's gonna We're just
Speaker 1: gonna run up the space. Um So, yeah, that is
Speaker 1: obviously the more negative sides of things California lack of
Speaker 1: rainwater and just and just lack of rain. Yeah absolutely, rain,
Speaker 1: yeah absolutely, And that brings up a really important point
Speaker 1: that you know, you're talking about moving the coffee trees
Speaker 1: further and further up a mountain as the areas that
Speaker 1: are considered prime agricultural areas moves north for us, you
Speaker 1: have to think about the infrastructural challenges that brings. So
Speaker 1: it's not just you're going to grow the crops in
Speaker 1: one place, but the infrastructure, the trains, all these different
Speaker 1: things don't exist in the places where you'll be able
Speaker 1: to grow those foods. So speaking of something you know
Speaker 1: around that rough kind of idea is like, if someone's
Speaker 1: never never done this before, they're out to go get stuff,
Speaker 1: where would you where would someone like that fine seeds? Um,
Speaker 1: Let's say that they don't let's say they don't use
Speaker 1: the internet's tons um whereabouts where you think they'll go
Speaker 1: and get cauliflower seeds or carrot seeds if they if
Speaker 1: they want to start doing this stuff. Yeah, So there's
Speaker 1: a bunch of different growers that offer seeds. And one
Speaker 1: of the things to keep in mind with annuals is
Speaker 1: that it does make sense if you can to buy
Speaker 1: them locally, because what within a couple of generations, plants
Speaker 1: will start evolving towards local conditions. It's it's really beneficial,
Speaker 1: especially with like I said, with climate change, to start
Speaker 1: thinking about how can we integrate our food systems into
Speaker 1: the ecological conditions where we live, and that ecology includes
Speaker 1: the climate. So we have to continuously more thoughtfully start
Speaker 1: thinking about these things and how we grow food and
Speaker 1: where those foods come from in order to really be
Speaker 1: able to deal with and mitigate the effects of climate change.
Speaker 1: So a great resources Johnny's seed they do a lot
Speaker 1: of really good work and there they have good quality stuff.
Speaker 1: And there's a bunch of seed companies out there that
Speaker 1: have done some really problem matic stuff that I won't
Speaker 1: go into or talk about, but they're these guys, as
Speaker 1: far as I'm aware, are pretty good. So I would
Speaker 1: definitely recommend them. Awesome. Yeah, their website is just Johnny
Speaker 1: Seeds dot com. Just for everyone who's looking that up
Speaker 1: at it's Johnny with a Y. Good for Johnny with
Speaker 1: a Y. Great. All right, Let's now, let's say someone
Speaker 1: lives in a downtown apartment in a metropolitan area. They
Speaker 1: don't have immediate access to you know, tons of dirt
Speaker 1: or you know, grass, but they want to start kind
Speaker 1: of growing some stuff. If if you were in that position,
Speaker 1: what would you start doing? And to that, I want
Speaker 1: to to part that that would be somebody with a
Speaker 1: balcony where they have access to like even like a
Speaker 1: little pattio area or those and then without yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: So there's a bunch of different things you can do.
Speaker 1: Starting with if you have a balcony, you can start
Speaker 1: thinking about getting pots, filling them up with soil, amending
Speaker 1: that soil is needed as you add plants, and again
Speaker 1: the general rule is to think about how big a
Speaker 1: plant gets, and how big a plant gets is how
Speaker 1: big its root system is going to get. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's not accurate by any means, but it's just a
Speaker 1: good rule of thumb to think about as you're doing
Speaker 1: something like this, and you know, if you have a
Speaker 1: tiny pot, then something that gets big is not going
Speaker 1: to work. Might be better for a lettuce or whatever.
Speaker 1: And there's a bunch of different places you can look
Speaker 1: online for how to grow things on balconies and things
Speaker 1: like that. You can also, and this is really dependent
Speaker 1: on money, is start thinking about out things like grow lights,
Speaker 1: which really are not that complicated once you start learning
Speaker 1: a bit about them, hydroponics, which comes with their own
Speaker 1: challenges because at the end of the day, while it's
Speaker 1: nice to be able to grow food in your house,
Speaker 1: you're still relying on extractive processes. So you know your
Speaker 1: nutrients are coming from fossil fuel essentially, So that's just
Speaker 1: something to be aware of. It's probably still better than
Speaker 1: the alternative of buying food on the shelf, but it
Speaker 1: is something to be aware of in that process that
Speaker 1: it's not really a sustainable quote unquote practice, got it?
Speaker 1: And what are some of the go twos for a
Speaker 1: balcony garden that you would recommend for people that are
Speaker 1: just starting out. Definitely, those leafy greens are a good
Speaker 1: place to start. They grow small, they have smaller roots systems.
Speaker 1: Most times, things like lettuces don't need a ton of
Speaker 1: sun to grow super well. As long as they get
Speaker 1: a decent amount, they'll be fine. They're not like a
Speaker 1: tomato that's gonna like be desperately looking for that that
Speaker 1: sun and that energy. So those smaller greens are generally
Speaker 1: a better option. Great. Yeah, I was able to grow
Speaker 1: kale and like a pot this of this winter and
Speaker 1: it was great. Yeah, Kale is a great one here
Speaker 1: in New England. It's really nice because you can grow
Speaker 1: it under glass during the winter, so even if you
Speaker 1: get a cold spell, it will stay just warm enough
Speaker 1: to make it pretty much throughout the winter. All right, Now,
Speaker 1: I have no balcony. I only have, you know, two
Speaker 1: small windows, you know I have. I have like a
Speaker 1: counter and stuff, you know, I can like can set
Speaker 1: up stuff, but I do not have tons of outdoor access.
Speaker 1: But I I would like to stop buying dil every
Speaker 1: time I go to the store, because I use it
Speaker 1: in my homemade ranch dressing. Now can I just buy
Speaker 1: those like pre pre podded stuff and just water them
Speaker 1: or kind of like if if if I want to
Speaker 1: get more in depth, what are they? You know, some
Speaker 1: things that are beyond that, but not you know, making this,
Speaker 1: you know, making this giant set up. So you could
Speaker 1: be creative and do something that's less than eagle. And
Speaker 1: there's this practice known as guerrilla gardening. I was I
Speaker 1: was gonna mention girly grillly gardening soon. Yeah. Sure, So
Speaker 1: this is like something that works really well, and there's
Speaker 1: a bunch of different ways you can do it, and
Speaker 1: it really depends on your local conditions and what can
Speaker 1: grow out in the wild and needs a lot of
Speaker 1: maintenance and what doesn't. And I don't know the Pacific
Speaker 1: Northwest a well, but it is warm enough that I
Speaker 1: think theyll would probably do fine, and it is wet
Speaker 1: enough that bill would probably do fine. So you could
Speaker 1: just go anywhere where there's green space that nobody checks
Speaker 1: things and just drop some plants in. You could start
Speaker 1: seedlings in your house and bring them where you want
Speaker 1: to harvest it later, and it's on your walk to
Speaker 1: work or where you get coffee or whatever. Drop it
Speaker 1: in the ground, make sure the roots are you know,
Speaker 1: not bound up, and make sure it's got a nice
Speaker 1: watered wrench right when you put it in the ground
Speaker 1: so it starts adjusting. And that's you know, that's that's
Speaker 1: the first step in something as simple as gerla agriculture.
Speaker 1: One of the first things that we tried to do
Speaker 1: when I got kind of started in you know, the
Speaker 1: you know Portland's kind of more lefty seed was you know,
Speaker 1: ideas for you know, building a community garden somewhere. And yeah,
Speaker 1: because there is just a lot of dirt, especially like
Speaker 1: Portland's specifically lucky just because we just have so much
Speaker 1: green space. Uh, there's a lot of places to to
Speaker 1: start grill gardening. Just start doing our own little community garden.
Speaker 1: Do you do you have any alleged experience in guerrilla gardening. Yes,
Speaker 1: So if you're on Instagram, I post a bit about
Speaker 1: some of the guerrilla gardening stuff that I do. UM.
Speaker 1: I generally focus on guerrilla gardening, not necessarily for my
Speaker 1: own consumption, but more for ecological mitigation for damage from
Speaker 1: um clear cutting and things like that. So I go
Speaker 1: out and try to plant things that are native to
Speaker 1: regions and try to bring them back a little bit.
Speaker 1: So that's one of the challenges that we see here
Speaker 1: on the East Coast is not only are our cities
Speaker 1: not really designed with green space and mind and for
Speaker 1: community gardens, I almost never recommend them just because in
Speaker 1: places like Boston they're hard to get into and a
Speaker 1: lot of major cities like you can be on wait
Speaker 1: lists for years, So that's not really a short term
Speaker 1: solution or a solution for a lot of people that
Speaker 1: are rather transient where you might move communities every three
Speaker 1: or four or five years. Um. So like guerrilla gardening
Speaker 1: works really great for those folks because you can do
Speaker 1: it when you want and how you want. Nothing says
Speaker 1: community like a waitlist, right No. Like, in terms of
Speaker 1: community gardens, I think you know, there's been a lot
Speaker 1: of people asking about how they get involved in mutual
Speaker 1: aiden stuff, especially if they don't have like friends or
Speaker 1: like they don't have many friends or connections to activism.
Speaker 1: I think one of the best ways to start anything
Speaker 1: like that is just all you need is like yourself
Speaker 1: and maybe one or two other people that you know
Speaker 1: to just start a community garden somewhere. And that's a
Speaker 1: very very nice on ramp into like community organizing. Absolutely
Speaker 1: back in Portland when I used to live in the Southwest,
Speaker 1: there was there's just whole like community plots that are
Speaker 1: like you know, more like official but still pretty like decentralized.
Speaker 1: That you could just basically go up to one of
Speaker 1: the bank at plots and just start planting food in
Speaker 1: this community setting, and like once a month all of
Speaker 1: the different gardeners would like get together and talk about
Speaker 1: what their going and stuff, and they you know, could
Speaker 1: trade produce. Be like I'm growing I'm growing pumpkins, You're
Speaker 1: growing butternut squash. I want one of your squash. I
Speaker 1: want one of your pumpkins. Right, you can like that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. Um or if you know, if you
Speaker 1: end up having with having like a larger hole, you
Speaker 1: can just give it out to random people. It turns
Speaker 1: out people might like receiving fresh produce. That could be
Speaker 1: another way of making friends and making connections. If you're
Speaker 1: kind of isolated in the city and you only have
Speaker 1: one or two other people, you can't start start a
Speaker 1: new community garden somewhere in the city just like scope
Speaker 1: out of spot, start growing and then and to speak
Speaker 1: to that you know, One of the things is that
Speaker 1: if you act like your official and you're supposed to
Speaker 1: be there and you know you're supposed to be there,
Speaker 1: people generally don't really question you, especially when it comes
Speaker 1: to plants. Like if I go to like a median
Speaker 1: and go plant some trees, Like as long as I
Speaker 1: act like I know what I'm doing and like don't
Speaker 1: look like I'm trying to be sneaky, no one ever
Speaker 1: questions me. And that's the key thing, is to really
Speaker 1: make it clear that like, you know you're supposed to
Speaker 1: be there when whenever I eventually I'll put together an
Speaker 1: episode on like urban stealth and stuff. And there's nothing
Speaker 1: more powerful than like a hive is vest just an
Speaker 1: incredibly powerful tool for making people glaze over you and
Speaker 1: think you're a professional. It's a music or in this case,
Speaker 1: like when I'm doing what I do, you know, I'll
Speaker 1: borrow someone's old beat up pickup truck and throw a
Speaker 1: couple of big trees in the back, and like you
Speaker 1: see that pulled over on the side of the road
Speaker 1: with its hazard lights on, Nobody's going to question that.
Speaker 1: It's like a town or a city, and if somebody
Speaker 1: from the town shows up as I'm from the DPW
Speaker 1: or whatever. Yeah, there's it's incredibly incredibly useful. Um and yeah,
Speaker 1: but like getting to know you know, if you're like
Speaker 1: I don't know where to find a local you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know how to like where I would pick
Speaker 1: a local community garden spot, be like you should like
Speaker 1: get to know your local area. It's in another great
Speaker 1: way of figuring out how to start doing any mutulate
Speaker 1: or anything. It's like, you need to know where you
Speaker 1: live and like, what's what's around you? Who others who
Speaker 1: you know? Maybe in your search to find the community
Speaker 1: garden you might find one that already exists. If you're
Speaker 1: unfamiliar with your you know, with if you're in a
Speaker 1: metropolitan area or if you're more out in the middle
Speaker 1: of nowhere, you may not know what's around you. And
Speaker 1: I mean looking out to see what's actually in the
Speaker 1: community is one of the first big steps to have
Speaker 1: any kind of and that plays out also in ecology.
Speaker 1: So you know, if you're in a city, most cities
Speaker 1: have public forest parks, whatever it might be. And part
Speaker 1: of not knowing what's around you, or knowing rather what's
Speaker 1: around you is starting to identify the plants that are
Speaker 1: already around you. And while there's been a lot of
Speaker 1: action in terms of thinking about things like foraging, UM,
Speaker 1: there's there's a ton of opportunity for us to start
Speaker 1: looking at foods that we don't traditionally think of foods
Speaker 1: but produce a ton of calories. So something like oaks.
Speaker 1: Oaks are across the United States. I don't think there's
Speaker 1: any state without oak trees and acorns can be a
Speaker 1: huge part of anyone's die if they're willing to take
Speaker 1: the time and more and about them. And that's not
Speaker 1: something that's radical or anything. It's something that's been done
Speaker 1: for thousands of years. It's just in in our lifetime,
Speaker 1: in our parents lifetime, that that knowledge and that experience
Speaker 1: has been mostly lost. But it's not something that's weird
Speaker 1: or unaccessible or any of those types of things. Absolutely, UM,
Speaker 1: I think this is actually a decent cutting off point
Speaker 1: for this episode and then the next in in in
Speaker 1: the In the next episode in the feed here we
Speaker 1: will focus more on ecology UM books, more on soil,
Speaker 1: and maybe get into like permaculture and some other kind
Speaker 1: of stuff because I would love to learn more about
Speaker 1: you know, specific soil stuff and you know different, you
Speaker 1: know more insight to our current like growing situation overall
Speaker 1: as like a country and how you know stuff is changing.
Speaker 1: But um, would you like to plug anything really to
Speaker 1: you or any other like resources on this topic before
Speaker 1: we head out? Absolutely so we are a podcast. Go
Speaker 1: check us out prols dot com or Spotify. Wherever you're
Speaker 1: listening to this podcast, you can go check out some
Speaker 1: of our work. We're also on Instagram and Facebook like
Speaker 1: everyone else, and you can go follow us over there. Fantastic. Um.
Speaker 1: If you want to keep up to date on stuff
Speaker 1: for this show, you can follow cool Zone cool Zone
Speaker 1: Media and Happen Here pod on Twitter and Instagram and
Speaker 1: you can catch more It could happen here daily in
Speaker 1: this feed. Uh, see you tomorrow. Bye, It's soil tom Hello,
Speaker 1: welcome to it could happen here. We're talking about we're
Speaker 1: talking about dirt today, big big, big dirt fans here.
Speaker 1: We love, we love dirt, we love soil. Um And
Speaker 1: to help us talk about soil, dirt, ecology, growing for
Speaker 1: forging all of this kind of stuff, we have Andy
Speaker 1: from the Poor Pearl's Almanac podcast about you know what
Speaker 1: to do after you know stuff kind of crumbles away
Speaker 1: slowly kind of kind of like kind of like our podcast. Um,
Speaker 1: and we're not like our soil hopefully. Well I got
Speaker 1: some bad news for you there. Some of us are
Speaker 1: not great at cultivating soil, which is what we are
Speaker 1: talking about today is how to avoid getting a lot
Speaker 1: of void, Like, how can we help help against our
Speaker 1: soil just blowing away? Um? Yeah, that is that is
Speaker 1: That is our discussion. I I wrapped up like a
Speaker 1: week of research on California specific climate and drought and
Speaker 1: what all the farmers are doing. Um, and a lot
Speaker 1: of their soil is blowing away and so far their
Speaker 1: solution to that is just spray more water on it,
Speaker 1: which the problem is there's not tons of water. Um,
Speaker 1: so let's talk about dirt. Let's talk about soil. I
Speaker 1: will hand it over to the residents. Soy boy, the
Speaker 1: soil expert here, because I don't know what I'm talking
Speaker 1: about with dirt. My puns are getting famous, I know
Speaker 1: I have. That was that was just that I was
Speaker 1: just ripping, ripping off of a title of one of
Speaker 1: his episodes. So that's not original. Blame him for the pond. Sorry,
Speaker 1: I do that a lot. So in terms of building soil.
Speaker 1: There's it's really a basic idea of how to do it,
Speaker 1: and it generally comes down to understanding what a soil
Speaker 1: needs and how to let the soil build through rest
Speaker 1: and generally speaking, when we plant our annual crops, what
Speaker 1: happens is you put your tomato plants in the ground,
Speaker 1: whatever it might be. You've got a great harvest, you
Speaker 1: you know, let them die, clear them out, and then
Speaker 1: the next year maybe you throw some more compost on it,
Speaker 1: or maybe you're like, I just don't want time, I
Speaker 1: won't do it, and you'll grow and you might have
Speaker 1: a pretty decent crop again. Then usually by like the
Speaker 1: third year, you start to notice that your plants just
Speaker 1: aren't doing as well, like all the nutrients and the
Speaker 1: minerals have started to get taken out of the soil.
Speaker 1: So you can either continuously add new material to it,
Speaker 1: which comes from somewhere doesn't seem very sustainable. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: absolutely not sustainable. And the alternative is to think about
Speaker 1: how can I build up that soil without doing that,
Speaker 1: And there's a couple of different ways we can do that.
Speaker 1: The soil can get built from things like cover crops,
Speaker 1: so we can add cover crops. Generally things like nitrogen
Speaker 1: fixing plants, clovers, hairy vetch, and a number of others
Speaker 1: that we can use to help fix nitrogen into the soil.
Speaker 1: Or we can add other things to add biomass. So
Speaker 1: certain grasses and things like that can be planted and
Speaker 1: they'll mine deep into the soil to pull up nutrients
Speaker 1: when they die off, or you can cut them down
Speaker 1: they start breaking down, they return those nutrients back, but
Speaker 1: they're on the top soil now, So that's another way
Speaker 1: we can do it. Alternatively, we're talking about a little
Speaker 1: bit more land. You can take advantage of using animals
Speaker 1: so chickens, rabbits, cheap cows, whatever it might be, reintroduce
Speaker 1: nutrients back into the soil through things like rotational grazing.
Speaker 1: And there's a you know that, that's a whole other
Speaker 1: subject of you know, how different methods are better or
Speaker 1: worse for fixing nitrogen and all the other nutrients back
Speaker 1: into the soil, and um we can talk about it.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you want to spend an hour
Speaker 1: talking about it. I assume that that definitely depends on
Speaker 1: the scale of your operation. I would assume absolutely, and
Speaker 1: you can do that on a smaller scale, not necessarily cows,
Speaker 1: but like chickens can. Chickens can be run through chicken tractors,
Speaker 1: which can be as small as you know, three ft
Speaker 1: by six ft. And we're making Yeah, we were making
Speaker 1: some fertilizer a few months ago and basically we braked up,
Speaker 1: well I did. I watched as people did this because
Speaker 1: I was lazy. I watched people as rake up tons
Speaker 1: of sheep shit um because there we have there's a
Speaker 1: little sheep set up, and they were just raking up
Speaker 1: all the ship and putting into a pile of dirt.
Speaker 1: And now it's been like a it's been like a
Speaker 1: month or two, and we should have some okay fertilizer
Speaker 1: by now, which we can you know, use however we
Speaker 1: see fit. But chickens, chickens, chickens as well, not not
Speaker 1: everyone probably has sheep or access to sheep um, but
Speaker 1: chickens are surprisingly easy to get. Yeah, and depending on
Speaker 1: the city or in uh you can live in pretty
Speaker 1: dense places and still legally have chickens. You might have
Speaker 1: to get comfortable with the idea of slaughtering a rooster,
Speaker 1: but other than that, you know, there's it's funny because
Speaker 1: what you'll see is like in the early spring, everyone
Speaker 1: gets chickens, and then by like July u on on
Speaker 1: Craigslist or Facebook or Instagram, everyone's like, free rooster to
Speaker 1: good home because they can't slaughter themselves. Uh. Yeah, I've
Speaker 1: had I've had to watch a few roosters get the
Speaker 1: get the old old acts. There was there was this
Speaker 1: one rooster that would always wake up as we were
Speaker 1: all going to bed. We would have like we have
Speaker 1: like a movie night, um, and we're like going to
Speaker 1: bed at four am, and that's when the rooster starts.
Speaker 1: We're like no, we're trying to sleep, and we're like,
Speaker 1: we need to kill that rooster. It's time. It's time.
Speaker 1: One bad day to be like I cannot listen to
Speaker 1: that sound again. At least at least it went to
Speaker 1: some good use. Yeah, anyway, back to dirt. Yeah, let's
Speaker 1: see where we keep talking about reintroducing stuff via you know,
Speaker 1: chemical means I mean, or or just using animals and stuff,
Speaker 1: or or rotating plants. Yeah. So there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: different ways you can do it, and obviously it's all
Speaker 1: defined by what your site needs. You know. The way
Speaker 1: we're talking at this point has been mostly about like
Speaker 1: you already have a garden and that soil needs to
Speaker 1: be amended to improve it. But if you're working with,
Speaker 1: say a site that has almost no top soil. So
Speaker 1: for example, a friend of mine out in California lives
Speaker 1: near a highway and they scraped all the top soil
Speaker 1: around the highway to build up the highway. So now
Speaker 1: there's no top soil, it's just garbage. So how do
Speaker 1: you build that soil up? And there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: different ways we can do that, whether it's through taking
Speaker 1: advantage of free resources like um mulch. Like if you
Speaker 1: see a tree getting cut down and they chip it
Speaker 1: all up, those guys have to pay to get rid
Speaker 1: of it most of the time, or they get paid
Speaker 1: just enough to cover their gas. So if you see
Speaker 1: it down the street and say, hey, you want to
Speaker 1: drop it off in my house, they'll happily do it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We we just found out there is this business in
Speaker 1: Portland that you can email them to do a chip
Speaker 1: drop where they take all of their mulch and wood
Speaker 1: chips and drop them off in your driveway and it's
Speaker 1: completely free. You you you you don't need to pay
Speaker 1: for it. You can just schedule them to drop it
Speaker 1: off anywhere. And a short aside, we also found out
Speaker 1: that they don't quire address verification, so you can do
Speaker 1: this as a prank. Um, you can find out where
Speaker 1: the mayor lives, um or where I don't know a
Speaker 1: particularly bad person lives. Let's say he wears armor and
Speaker 1: he brutalizes people and threatens them with guns while having
Speaker 1: a badge. You can find out if you know where
Speaker 1: he lives, you can just deliver tons of wood chips
Speaker 1: right right on this driveway. Um. And and they have
Speaker 1: a rule on their website is once a delivery has
Speaker 1: been initiated, it's like once the truck leaves you know,
Speaker 1: their office, it cannot be stopped. There's no way, there's
Speaker 1: no way preventing it. And they don't contact the house beforehand,
Speaker 1: no way preventing it. Just a random, random wood chip
Speaker 1: drop anywhere in any driveway. It's a magical system. But
Speaker 1: you can also just use this for you know, getting
Speaker 1: wood chips to help grow things. Yeah, and well, just
Speaker 1: such an underrated medium. It's like really good for like
Speaker 1: water retention and helping soil not dry out too fast.
Speaker 1: It's it's not just like aesthetically nice looking and accessible.
Speaker 1: It's also like really good for the plants. So I'll
Speaker 1: add to caveats to that, And the first is that
Speaker 1: it's really important to know what species you're dealing with
Speaker 1: that are the wood chips, because certain species have chemicals
Speaker 1: on them that will reduce growth or stop it completely.
Speaker 1: So like black walnuts are really well known and on
Speaker 1: the East Coast as having what's called juglone, And there's
Speaker 1: a bunch of different species that again are probably unique
Speaker 1: to where you live that you should just be aware of.
Speaker 1: And the second one is that mulch and wood chips
Speaker 1: are fantastic for your garden. However, the one drawback is
Speaker 1: that for the wood chips to break down, they actually
Speaker 1: utilize a lot of the nitrogen in the soil. So
Speaker 1: that's just so you may have a bit of a
Speaker 1: nitrogen problem or some kind of nitrogen fixing, so it
Speaker 1: would be more important to think about cover crops and
Speaker 1: either adding freshman compost or whatever it might be help
Speaker 1: offset some of that nitrogen absorption. So so it's not
Speaker 1: it's a great resource, it's just not perfect. You just
Speaker 1: have to be aware of the limitations of it. I
Speaker 1: would like to touch on why we're in a bit
Speaker 1: of a pickle, like what what what what have we
Speaker 1: done agriculturally to kind of make our soil so unfragile?
Speaker 1: Like what what did we do wrong? Um on? Like
Speaker 1: even on a larger scale, and how how might someone
Speaker 1: like me who just has a small set up, you know,
Speaker 1: not make the same mistakes in my own personal garden. Sure,
Speaker 1: so the beginning of the food system becoming what it
Speaker 1: is today really started with oil. Um access to things
Speaker 1: like petrochemicals allowed us to start rethinking about how we
Speaker 1: grew food and forgetting about traditional methods summarily, things like
Speaker 1: using the newer I mean, you think about it. You eat,
Speaker 1: all the nutrients go out the sewer and then they
Speaker 1: never go back into the soil. And we're constantly taking
Speaker 1: from the same soils year after year. And the only
Speaker 1: way we continue to produce is because we're dumping chem
Speaker 1: coals enforcing the soil, which is just a medium at
Speaker 1: this point. It's just dirt, it's not soil, and we're
Speaker 1: just making it grow food because we're adding the chemicals
Speaker 1: the plants need. But we've destroyed things like the bacterial community,
Speaker 1: the fungag community, all these different things that are so
Speaker 1: crucial for our food systems to be resilient in terms
Speaker 1: of how can we move forward. Building that soil is
Speaker 1: super important and understanding these cycles of where our food
Speaker 1: comes from. The biggest challenge really is that we're trying
Speaker 1: to create ethical food systems under an inethical economic model. Sure, so,
Speaker 1: like you'll see, like permaculture is like a really big
Speaker 1: thing today and for a lot of good reasons because
Speaker 1: it challenges that methodology. However, because of things like capitalism,
Speaker 1: we can't really have an honest conversation about the fact
Speaker 1: that a lot of people will tell you you can
Speaker 1: make money doing permaculture, and some people do, but it's
Speaker 1: not it's not really what people think. Like there's no
Speaker 1: way to ethically grow food and not have the problems
Speaker 1: of yeah, you're you're facing or competing with somebody that
Speaker 1: doesn't have any ethical guidelines or framework that you have
Speaker 1: to compete with. And I mean, there's plenty of things
Speaker 1: we can say that there are problems with permaculture, and
Speaker 1: if you want, we can talk about that further. But
Speaker 1: this is the primary reason why we can't really fundamentally
Speaker 1: rethink our food system until things either fall apart or
Speaker 1: capitalism no longer exists, or there are major subsidies for
Speaker 1: these alternatives, whatever it might be. Yeah, let's see, Like
Speaker 1: is even something like would you even say, just like
Speaker 1: someone buying pre made fertilizers should be avoided in that case,
Speaker 1: Like would you would you rather you know, someone trying
Speaker 1: to make it ourselves, and like what's cheaper you know,
Speaker 1: like it is just buying fertilizers or cheaper than I
Speaker 1: would actually make it yourself. There's another kind of problem
Speaker 1: with these types of things that it turns out, you know,
Speaker 1: the way to make things better might cost some people
Speaker 1: more money, you know than people who don't really have
Speaker 1: as many resources. You know, just like a regular person
Speaker 1: who's trying to do this, you know, they don't have
Speaker 1: as much money, and would would just buying pre made
Speaker 1: chemicals you know, easier and cheaper than doing work to
Speaker 1: kind of build it up more like quote unquote naturally,
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously, I think under capitalism, anything that's efficient
Speaker 1: in terms of time and um taking advantage of things
Speaker 1: like scalability, which you know, mining nutrients is always going
Speaker 1: to be more efficient when you're doing it on a
Speaker 1: massive global scale, Like you really can't compete dollar for dollar.
Speaker 1: And that's at least with what I do with the
Speaker 1: poor pros almanac. We don't really focus on that and
Speaker 1: instead say this is how things should be, and how
Speaker 1: do we do that and when do we need to
Speaker 1: start doing that if we know that what exists today
Speaker 1: isn't sustainable and that ultimately this is gonna fall apart
Speaker 1: in some capacity. Yeah, you talked more about like trees specifically,
Speaker 1: and I would love to love to hear them more
Speaker 1: about that, you know, outside of just you know, making
Speaker 1: your own like edible garden, doing doing other kind of
Speaker 1: ecology related related work. Sure, so trees have you know,
Speaker 1: so many benefits outside of the fact that they can
Speaker 1: produce food. Um, we could look at things like how
Speaker 1: they can manage a landscape and reduce temperature extremes, the
Speaker 1: way they can maintain soil quality because of UM, reducing
Speaker 1: things like runoff from major storms, which are happening more
Speaker 1: and more frequently. YEA. Further, like I said, they do
Speaker 1: produce food, and they sometimes they produce food for us,
Speaker 1: sometimes they produce food for our livestock. UM. Additionally, there's
Speaker 1: a process called silver pasture, which is essentially when you
Speaker 1: think of a farm, you think of a cow walking
Speaker 1: around in a field. Instead that cows walking around and
Speaker 1: a managed forest, and the forest floor gets enough sunlight
Speaker 1: to grow grass, so you're getting the benefits of the
Speaker 1: grass as well as the trees, and you can either
Speaker 1: be using those trees for lumber or for food crops
Speaker 1: or whatever it might be, and you're getting the best
Speaker 1: of both worlds. And in a lot of ways, the
Speaker 1: civil pastor's system more accurately represents the way the landscape
Speaker 1: had been managed, especially here in the northeast and generally
Speaker 1: the East coast, by indigenous people. Um, you know, they
Speaker 1: weren't using cows. They were doing prescribed burns and things
Speaker 1: like that. But those environments are actually better for things
Speaker 1: like a deer, which like to like to exist on
Speaker 1: like the margins of forests where they're getting the best
Speaker 1: of both worlds. So that was how they managed a
Speaker 1: wild Essentially, they're wild grazing the native species. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: just I'm just trying to think there's like we we
Speaker 1: don't really have anything like that on a on a
Speaker 1: large scale anymore. We've we've just jumped right into like
Speaker 1: the the field and pasture thing. Yeah, I mean you
Speaker 1: think about it, it it makes sense that we haven't because
Speaker 1: of the fact that to do that requires individual reality.
Speaker 1: In terms of how we manage a landscape, you can't
Speaker 1: run a machine through sable pasture. You can't just make
Speaker 1: like a template and apply to every situation. Everything is
Speaker 1: much more unique based on their individual environment and ecosystem. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then it becomes less efficient to manage in terms
Speaker 1: of how we manage things as a successional thing where
Speaker 1: we have you go through the field and you seat
Speaker 1: it with a giant machine, because you can do it
Speaker 1: faster that way, you can add whatever amendments you need
Speaker 1: more quickly when it's just a flat piece of land
Speaker 1: with nothing in the way, so on and so on.
Speaker 1: It's just it doesn't It goes right in the face
Speaker 1: of how we think of efficiency, despite the fact, through
Speaker 1: its diversity, it's more resilient to what's coming in terms
Speaker 1: of climate change, especially the logs run. Yeah. Yeah. In
Speaker 1: the last episode we talked a bit about grilling gardening.
Speaker 1: Can this like intersect with with this idea of like
Speaker 1: growing in the forest? Um is there? You know, I
Speaker 1: assume there's like a decent cross over there. Absolutely, So,
Speaker 1: generally speaking, lot of people that are into silvil pasture
Speaker 1: are also thinking about things like tree crops. And one
Speaker 1: of the things that I really focus on is thinking
Speaker 1: about foods that we don't traditionally think of as foods,
Speaker 1: or at least not as like staple crops. So like,
Speaker 1: while people might be familiar with kind of the odd
Speaker 1: fruits like per simmons, you might know what a persimmon is.
Speaker 1: You might have one or two, or maybe make per
Speaker 1: simmon bread. That's not usually a large part of anyone's diet, no,
Speaker 1: And that's like, that's the challenge that we really have
Speaker 1: is while people like to incorporate these types of things
Speaker 1: in permaculture into you know, how they think about their
Speaker 1: relationship with the environment, Like nobody's giving up their toast
Speaker 1: in the morning, and that's you know, a third of
Speaker 1: your diet or whatever it might be. And that's where
Speaker 1: we need to fundamentally shift how we think about food.
Speaker 1: So you're saying that we need to change in order
Speaker 1: to address these large systemic issues that have caused many problems.
Speaker 1: We need to change the way we extract resources from
Speaker 1: the earth and maybe reevaluate how much we do. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, it's it's no small feet, is
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. I know, I'm just saying, like, you know,
Speaker 1: that's the this specific thing around like food and diet
Speaker 1: is the same route problem we have with climate change
Speaker 1: on a larger scale of like just doing you know,
Speaker 1: progress for progress's sake without realizing that this is not
Speaker 1: a sustainable way to do things. And infinite growing and
Speaker 1: like infinite expansion maybe is a bad idea. Yeah, maybe
Speaker 1: it has some consequence. Who has some consequences? Who would
Speaker 1: have thought that infinite growth on a finite planet wasn't sustainable? Oops? Yeah.
Speaker 1: The point that I'm really trying to drive home is
Speaker 1: that we really need to rethink what food looks like
Speaker 1: and it has to be in a meaningful way that
Speaker 1: it can't just be those odds and ends, and that
Speaker 1: the thing I think people forget is that food is
Speaker 1: a huge component of our culture and our identity. Absolutely
Speaker 1: think about food and identity. The reason why our identity
Speaker 1: surrounded around food is because food is the byproduct of
Speaker 1: the environment that we live in, and it's you know,
Speaker 1: for it's been a couple of generations and we went
Speaker 1: from the reason why Italians e x y z s
Speaker 1: because that's what grows there. Two, I eat this because
Speaker 1: my family does, but I don't know why. And that's
Speaker 1: the way those things relate to one another has been
Speaker 1: completely lost, and we need to figure out how to
Speaker 1: do that again. Can you point to any examples of
Speaker 1: these things you're talking about of, like you know, of
Speaker 1: systems existing now or in the past that of kind
Speaker 1: of shown these methods of viewing food and viewing you know,
Speaker 1: growing and soil cultivation. So like any indigenous practice. And
Speaker 1: like we say indigenous, and we usually mean like North
Speaker 1: America or South America or Australia. But even if you
Speaker 1: look across Europe, you know, before capitalism kind of got
Speaker 1: its clause into the rest of Europe or all of Europe, like,
Speaker 1: there were plenty of indigenous practices and in some places
Speaker 1: they continue and the way that people lived um reflected
Speaker 1: the needs of their ecology and how people could relate
Speaker 1: to that ecology. The reason why Nordic countries have high
Speaker 1: amounts of meat in their diet is because of what
Speaker 1: grows there and what how they can utilize what grows
Speaker 1: there to feed themselves through animals and things like that.
Speaker 1: M Yeah, I mean that is that is generally what
Speaker 1: we hear is you know, look at the various indigenous
Speaker 1: methods of growing um and how they how they fed
Speaker 1: people in their media the area, and thinking like, how
Speaker 1: can we take those similar ideas and scale it up?
Speaker 1: Because I mean, they weren't growing food for seven billion people.
Speaker 1: But I know, like, we grow way too much food
Speaker 1: for what for many people, maybe not too much food,
Speaker 1: just we distribute it in a very unefficient way because
Speaker 1: we don't do it for what we need. We do
Speaker 1: it for profits, and like we we we throw away
Speaker 1: so much food that we grow, as you know, globally um.
Speaker 1: But I know when I think of these more like
Speaker 1: older methods of growing food, it's it's harder for me
Speaker 1: to picture that, you know, feeding an entire city, right,
Speaker 1: And I don't know what the solution is here. This
Speaker 1: isn't really the thing I focus on a lot. But
Speaker 1: is there a way to kind of scale up these
Speaker 1: like smaller skill things that you know, people can do
Speaker 1: in their own yards on any kind of mass level
Speaker 1: or is that just kind of rely back on this
Speaker 1: thing thing we've need to like re reevaluate how much
Speaker 1: we consume and how we consume it. So I think
Speaker 1: there's a little bit of both. I think we do
Speaker 1: need to reevaluate what we're consuming and the volume that
Speaker 1: we're consuming as well as um, you know, the the
Speaker 1: waste specifically in terms of those two things that we
Speaker 1: tend to lose a lot of food that otherwise is
Speaker 1: useful um. But also there is a lot of opportunity
Speaker 1: and wild places like maybe New York City, because of
Speaker 1: the development around the city, might not there might not
Speaker 1: be any way possible to grow food, like within the
Speaker 1: metropolitan or even the region. We know that, like, and
Speaker 1: this is something I probably should have checked before the
Speaker 1: at but it's something like there's four acres of arable
Speaker 1: land for every person on Earth, and four acres is
Speaker 1: like that's plenty. That's plenty. That's absolutely plenty. UM. But like,
Speaker 1: one of the things that's really important is to start
Speaker 1: thinking about how we can decentralize these systems in order
Speaker 1: to have those clusters of places where those things are
Speaker 1: more um capable of growing and handling the production that's necessary.
Speaker 1: And so maybe rethink about what what urbanization really should
Speaker 1: be and what it should look like. And you know,
Speaker 1: in the future, while things may seem like well, you
Speaker 1: can't ask people to leave New York City as climate
Speaker 1: change worsens in our food systems startt to fall apart,
Speaker 1: that might be a much easier conversation to have, while
Speaker 1: today that seems kind of radical. Yeah, and at the
Speaker 1: very least, maybe we should maybe we shouldn't make any
Speaker 1: more New York cities. Absolutely. Um, is there any like
Speaker 1: resources online that you can point to that talks more
Speaker 1: about these types of topics or like books, sally anything
Speaker 1: in this general was growing on the growing side of
Speaker 1: things and then like the more like ecology side of things.
Speaker 1: So Tom Wessels has this really great book called The
Speaker 1: Myth of Progress, which talks about complex system science and
Speaker 1: essentially what that is is decentralization and um, the benefits
Speaker 1: of having diversity within a community and in fact that
Speaker 1: any any power that's you know, centered in one specific
Speaker 1: place ends up having imbalances and has less resiliency, and
Speaker 1: that plays until it's focused around ecology. But I think
Speaker 1: it's really helpful, especially if you're an anarchist. I think
Speaker 1: you can through the lens. Yeah. Yeah, so that that's
Speaker 1: definitely one place to look in terms of like growing food.
Speaker 1: I don't know if there's really any books that really
Speaker 1: address it. From this perspective of climate change and decentralization.
Speaker 1: But there's plenty of work online about silver pasture and
Speaker 1: you know, food force, any of these types of things.
Speaker 1: YouTube has like a vast array of resources, And of
Speaker 1: course if you're interested in this kind of stuff, you
Speaker 1: can come check us out on our podcast or proslamanac we. Uh,
Speaker 1: the entire show is pretty much around this subject matter,
Speaker 1: so you want to learn more about it and check
Speaker 1: it out. Yeah, absolutely definitely, UM if this specific topic,
Speaker 1: you have a wonderful catalog of stuff discussing this, UM
Speaker 1: and I just want to thank you they and thank
Speaker 1: you so much for coming on this show to kind
Speaker 1: of talk about these topics. You know, me and Robert
Speaker 1: and you know Chris, we more of like a background
Speaker 1: and like history and that kind of thing. We are.
Speaker 1: We are not super avid plant people, like we're trying
Speaker 1: to start growing more stuff to our ourselves personally, but
Speaker 1: I'm definitely not educated to talk on this, and I'm
Speaker 1: very very happy that you were able to when you're
Speaker 1: generous with your time and knowledge. So thank you, Thank
Speaker 1: you so much. Yeah, definitely check out their show on
Speaker 1: you know, wherever you get your podcasts and You can
Speaker 1: follow this show Twitter, on Instagram at cool Zone Media
Speaker 1: you and happen here pod um any any any final
Speaker 1: final notes. Grow some food, Yeah, grow some food. Grows
Speaker 1: some food. That is what if I've asked that question
Speaker 1: a lot and that answer has come up many times.
Speaker 1: Just growth, grow food. Okay, grows food. What spicy pumpkins?
Speaker 1: It was it was clipping where it's not clipping. You
Speaker 1: just don't like me saying, what's spicy my pumpkins? But
Speaker 1: I said it and it can't be unsaid. It was clipping.
Speaker 1: This is it could happen Here a daily podcast about
Speaker 1: the end of some things and the beginning of other things.
Speaker 1: And right now it's an episode about the beginning of fall.
Speaker 1: Because it's officially fall and I'm drinking a pumpkin spice
Speaker 1: black coffee for you. It's also not officially fall yet.
Speaker 1: It may it may be officially fall by the time
Speaker 1: this podcast comes legally fall when I have my first
Speaker 1: pumpkin spice black coffee of the year and it's cool outside.
Speaker 1: That's because you're a monster. It's because I'm a happy
Speaker 1: man who is enjoying a fall beverage. On this episode today,
Speaker 1: we have, of course Garrison Garrison, Hello, Hi Garrison. Are
Speaker 1: you doing. I'm doing fine great. We also have my
Speaker 1: friends be in a lane b E lane. You you
Speaker 1: you were on the show recently to talk about terrorism
Speaker 1: a year ago. Ye, recently. Everything before yesterday is a
Speaker 1: year ago. And uh and now you're on to talk
Speaker 1: about surviving. Yeah. Yeah, like crafty surviving punk. Yeah. We
Speaker 1: we brought made it this far. You on because you
Speaker 1: were like two of the most useful skill filled people
Speaker 1: that I know. You're both wilderness survival instructors, primitive skill
Speaker 1: instructors for a while, and you have a small farm
Speaker 1: in a town that I won't name, and you do
Speaker 1: all sorts of cool ship like storing food and making
Speaker 1: arrows and other things that are alleged. And what I
Speaker 1: like about that is that, you know, we talk about
Speaker 1: like collapse and and things falling apart. There's this kind
Speaker 1: of like I don't know, almost like mimetic obsession with
Speaker 1: like I want to get out into the woods and
Speaker 1: away from the city, and that's the only way to survive,
Speaker 1: and like the reality of the situations, that's a terrible
Speaker 1: way to survive. It's awful. There's nobody in the wood.
Speaker 1: There's nobody in the woods and people and it's you know,
Speaker 1: there's there are there are a small chunk of the
Speaker 1: human race that is capable with with just themselves of
Speaker 1: like surviving in the middle of nowhere with nobody. But
Speaker 1: there's even among that population, there's a small fraction who
Speaker 1: are capable of doing that and not shooting themselves after
Speaker 1: a long enough period of time, and you wouldn't want
Speaker 1: to meet that person generally. Well, And I think the
Speaker 1: other the other thing about that is like the sort
Speaker 1: of fetishization of of you know, individualists survival skills is
Speaker 1: based on this idea that what people when people were
Speaker 1: like living off the land, that they were doing it
Speaker 1: by themselves alone. Community. There's very few people that survived
Speaker 1: alone for a long time, and even of the people
Speaker 1: that had the skills, like even she wandered out of
Speaker 1: the woods after I think eight years of being by
Speaker 1: himself and was finally like fuck it. He was the
Speaker 1: last of a indigenous group in California where everyone else
Speaker 1: in his tribe had been basically with been genocided and
Speaker 1: him and like the last like five people went off
Speaker 1: and hid for very good reason. Um And then after
Speaker 1: disease and stuff, then it was just him, and he
Speaker 1: spent I forget how many years by himself, and after
Speaker 1: a while he finally was like, fuck it, being by
Speaker 1: myself is not worth it, and he came out, and
Speaker 1: it was just after the turn of the century, and
Speaker 1: so he ended up being adopted by a bunch of
Speaker 1: anthropologists and spending the rest of his time in San Francisco.
Speaker 1: It's actually where we get most of a lot of
Speaker 1: like the anthropological knowledge of how to make arrows, because
Speaker 1: he was very much like, I'm the last of my group,
Speaker 1: so I will actually show people how to do flint
Speaker 1: napping and how I make arrows and how I hunt
Speaker 1: and yeah, and that's but I mean, and that's there's
Speaker 1: kind of the point there that like, with all of
Speaker 1: those skills, being one of that very small number of people,
Speaker 1: who could you drop that guy alone with nothing in
Speaker 1: the woods and he'll figure it out. He didn't want
Speaker 1: to do that because it's miserable. He in fact went
Speaker 1: into San Francisco and was like, well, white people wiped
Speaker 1: out my entire gonna make friends with these anthropologists that
Speaker 1: live with them and teach them what I know. Yeah, again,
Speaker 1: a lot of the folks who are kind of reaching
Speaker 1: out online being like, hey, I don't have a lot
Speaker 1: in the way of money. I'm never gonna be able
Speaker 1: to move to the woods and buy a farm or something. Well,
Speaker 1: you don't. You don't really need to, And like if
Speaker 1: shi it really does hit the fan. Where you live,
Speaker 1: there's probably parks, unless it's Detroit, UM, in which case
Speaker 1: there's abandoned Walmart's. Like you can make it work, like
Speaker 1: there's it's so So this is an episode about kind
Speaker 1: of the skills that you can acquire and build for
Speaker 1: not a lot of money, more or less wherever you
Speaker 1: live that will help you build resiliency UM, but also
Speaker 1: build resiliency is part of a community, as opposed to
Speaker 1: living in the woods with a knife, sleeping under mud.
Speaker 1: There's a great short story that you'll turned me onto
Speaker 1: by Cory Doctor in a book of short stories called Radicalized.
Speaker 1: That was was it just called The Mask of the
Speaker 1: Red Death? I mean that's called The Master. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: original Mask of the Red Death is set obviously during UM.
Speaker 1: I'm sure everybody read it in high school, like right,
Speaker 1: It's is set during the Bubonic Plague with these rich
Speaker 1: people who like decided just hold up in party to
Speaker 1: escape the plague and they all die of the plague.
Speaker 1: And doctors is a bunch of like libertarians, survivalist crypto
Speaker 1: bros who build a fortress in the desert in order
Speaker 1: to survive the end of days. And it turns out
Speaker 1: that like a bunch of bad stuff happens, like there's
Speaker 1: disease and in civil conflict, but like people figure it out,
Speaker 1: and all of the crypto bros die shooting themselves to
Speaker 1: death because the water system. It's obvious from the start
Speaker 1: what's going and everybody who comes along to help them,
Speaker 1: they start shooting because you will just wait until you're dead,
Speaker 1: because you're shooting yourself because your water is bad. I
Speaker 1: think we all have, we all have elements of some
Speaker 1: libertarian tendencies in US, which you know, it's not bad
Speaker 1: to learn self reliance, and it's certainly not not even
Speaker 1: bad to want to like live outside of the city.
Speaker 1: But in a lot of ways, living in a living
Speaker 1: in an urban environment surrounded by a community, depending on
Speaker 1: the situation, can be even more resilient because like, yeah,
Speaker 1: an isolated farm instead there's benefits to but also it's
Speaker 1: really easy to surround and just shoot people who were
Speaker 1: living on their farm in the middle of nowhere. If
Speaker 1: ship really does hit the fani happening, it happens all
Speaker 1: the time. It happened in like Al Salvador and ship
Speaker 1: when they had their economic crash. So, I don't know,
Speaker 1: where do you want to Where do you guys want
Speaker 1: to start? Oh? I know you had a couple of
Speaker 1: different things that you want the want to talk about,
Speaker 1: Like preserving food is a big one, and then I
Speaker 1: mean making stuff and doing things is kind of they're
Speaker 1: sort of different. Where would you like to actually start
Speaker 1: with that? I think we can start with kind of
Speaker 1: the d I Y element, branching off of our original
Speaker 1: discussion on primitive skills, and then in like parts two,
Speaker 1: we can go more into like food and like sting
Speaker 1: like in like foraging, um and preservation and stuff. Cool.
Speaker 1: I mean, so d I why um? I guess now
Speaker 1: there's a lot of stuff about, Like there's I don't know,
Speaker 1: there's all this stuff of like survival skills and all
Speaker 1: this stuff, and both of us kind of came into
Speaker 1: the idea of making stuff and doing things by being
Speaker 1: punks um. And it's kind of yeah, having no money,
Speaker 1: but also just their d I Y like do it
Speaker 1: Yourself was a very like kind of nineties punk thing
Speaker 1: that came into the mainstream. Like I actually was pulling
Speaker 1: out some of my old books, and I think it's
Speaker 1: funny to see the like progression because I have, you know,
Speaker 1: the really lovely like Food Not Lawns that goes into
Speaker 1: a whole pile of really fantastic things that came out
Speaker 1: that I don't know. The first Food Not Lawns house
Speaker 1: I saw at the Town as in was in like
Speaker 1: two thousand five or six, but this book came out
Speaker 1: in two thousand and six. But it was this entire
Speaker 1: movement of like making community and doing and like how
Speaker 1: to do stuff yourself on your front lawn. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then I have from eleven the bus d i Y
Speaker 1: Guide to Life that includes everything from like how to
Speaker 1: do worm composting to how to make your own makeup
Speaker 1: and like finance the house. And that's that's like the magazine, right. Yes,
Speaker 1: So it's kind of interesting because it definitely like was
Speaker 1: the thing that I watched come into the mainstream. But
Speaker 1: you know, it started as a lot of punks trying
Speaker 1: to figure out how to do things because they had
Speaker 1: no money and but also different from a lot of
Speaker 1: you know, like woodworking or draft books that really are
Speaker 1: you know by these seven thousand dollars worth of tools
Speaker 1: and now you too can learn Yes. And there's also
Speaker 1: there's also an ethos behind it, right that, like before
Speaker 1: I was, I came at it first and foremost through
Speaker 1: being like a bike punk in the in the late
Speaker 1: nineties early two thousand's, being a bike punk, and the
Speaker 1: idea of like the d I y ethos was less
Speaker 1: about the grid is going to collapse and like everything
Speaker 1: is going to fall apart and you're going to need
Speaker 1: to survive by the skin of your teeth, and it
Speaker 1: was a lot more, you know, at the tail end
Speaker 1: of the nineties and like the sort of golden era
Speaker 1: of neoliberal capitalism and office space and that whole cultural moment,
Speaker 1: the idea that life was alienated and shitty and it
Speaker 1: felt better to know how to do things that you
Speaker 1: needed in your day to day life for yourself, using
Speaker 1: stuff you had made yourself or gotten from your community members.
Speaker 1: Yet resiliency is less about knowing you have a pile
Speaker 1: of dried food in the house and know more about
Speaker 1: looking at fresh food and knowing, I know how to
Speaker 1: make that last the winter yeah, And it's been interesting
Speaker 1: to see the way that like as that has gotten
Speaker 1: kind of mainstreamed into like, you know, the the what
Speaker 1: is it primitive. There's a bunch of different like primitive
Speaker 1: x y Z YouTube channels that get lots of shot
Speaker 1: wreck and ship, and as that all gets mainstreamed, there's
Speaker 1: this idea of like expertise that creeps back into it.
Speaker 1: And d I Y was like firmly committed to the
Speaker 1: idea that everybody could learn stuff and listening to somebody
Speaker 1: who said they were an expert was a trap. And
Speaker 1: a lot of that was coming out of like the
Speaker 1: seventies when there was all of the like you know,
Speaker 1: CULTI lifestyle ship that was like, hey, look we're gonna
Speaker 1: teach you how to change your life, and yeah, we're
Speaker 1: gonna we're gonna buy up all this land and Antelope,
Speaker 1: Oregon and and so d I Y was exactly not
Speaker 1: that it was like their's skills and you can and
Speaker 1: skills and the Internet doesn't really exist yet or not really,
Speaker 1: so you can read books about it and you can
Speaker 1: have skills fare because there wasn't Twitter. We also all
Speaker 1: had a lot more time on our hands. But there's
Speaker 1: also like expertise was something that was handy to have,
Speaker 1: you know, like if I needed to rebuild my wheel
Speaker 1: on my bike and respoke it, somebody who knew how
Speaker 1: to do it, And so it's good to have a
Speaker 1: couple of people who had really intense, deep knowledge of skills.
Speaker 1: But the idea that you would ask someone like I
Speaker 1: need to change my bike tire two because I popped
Speaker 1: it with everyone would have been kind of like really
Speaker 1: really like everyone should know how to do basic stuff
Speaker 1: and it's and it's okay. Like the whole you know,
Speaker 1: Jack of all Trades was is as a desirable goal,
Speaker 1: like it's okay to dabble in a million little things
Speaker 1: and be kind of mediocre, but have a sort of
Speaker 1: baseline understanding of a bunch of stuff. Now, you know,
Speaker 1: they places that I kind of think that we went
Speaker 1: too far. But also, you know, before the American Healthcare Act,
Speaker 1: we all definitely did a lot of at home medcare
Speaker 1: that we should not have. But there's also a lot
Speaker 1: of low stakes places that I think people have gotten
Speaker 1: away from just practicing and trying all sorts of crafty
Speaker 1: stuff as an ethos that is actually really good and
Speaker 1: there's no harm to learning things like you're not going
Speaker 1: to quote anything, and the only thing that's going to
Speaker 1: happen is you will have more skills and more to
Speaker 1: offer the people around you. There's this idea under capitalism
Speaker 1: that we should all specialize because that is like the
Speaker 1: most profit generating thing to do is just specialize anything
Speaker 1: that makes you the most money. But it's like, not
Speaker 1: only is it like not the best in a dangerous
Speaker 1: situation to only know how to do one thing that
Speaker 1: makes you money, but it's like it's not particularly good
Speaker 1: for your soul either. And there's also lots of different
Speaker 1: behavioral psychology, like group analysis of if you present people
Speaker 1: with a situation that they feel unprepared for and there's
Speaker 1: a person that they identify as an expert in a
Speaker 1: group who they can defer to pretty much every time,
Speaker 1: the group that's like, oh, we'll defer to this one
Speaker 1: expert because they know everything and we'll just do whatever
Speaker 1: they say ends up making worse decisions. Then if you
Speaker 1: have a group where everybody feels like, oh, well, I
Speaker 1: like I can at least get a handle on what's
Speaker 1: going on and we can all talk through it and
Speaker 1: like make make calls deferring to experts doesn't necessarily help
Speaker 1: you know that there's obviously cases we've mentioned medical care already,
Speaker 1: where like there's actually knowledge is very important. Skill sets
Speaker 1: are very important. But the idea that there's people who
Speaker 1: are just like, yeah, inherently more knowledgeable of things that
Speaker 1: you couldn't possibly understand. Is so where where do you
Speaker 1: recommend Like people's like, like like, you've got a bunch of
Speaker 1: books right now, and obviously, if you can afford books,
Speaker 1: that's a good call. A lot of these books on
Speaker 1: a preserving food and like growing stuff on your lawn,
Speaker 1: but even if you don't have a lawn, you can still, Like,
Speaker 1: there's certain like one thing that strikes me because we've
Speaker 1: been canning and pickling a bunch lately, is you know,
Speaker 1: different vegetables and fruits and whatnot are cheaper at different
Speaker 1: points in the year. And even if you live in
Speaker 1: an apartment in the inner city and will never have
Speaker 1: more than a garden box at best, you can buy
Speaker 1: food when it's cheap and preserve it um and not
Speaker 1: only save yourself a little bit of money, but you
Speaker 1: can like also, uh, you'll you'll understand every time you
Speaker 1: encounter preserved food and like a grocery store. You'll be
Speaker 1: looking at a thing that you know where it comes from.
Speaker 1: It's not just like a mystery jar of preserved food
Speaker 1: that was made by some process of science. So I
Speaker 1: don't know, I'm interested in, like where you guys someone
Speaker 1: coming in having only uh specialized and whatever it is
Speaker 1: allowed them to pay the rent? Where Where where's your
Speaker 1: where's your recommended start point? For people? UM, I think
Speaker 1: it's picking something that is low stakes that you enjoy.
Speaker 1: Like honestly, one of my friends, um, her entry into
Speaker 1: doing d I Y stuff was, you know, she had
Speaker 1: lots of makeup and everything, and she was like, I'm
Speaker 1: going to make body scrubs? How do I do that?
Speaker 1: And you know, looked up how to make body scrubs?
Speaker 1: How to make you know. A lot of it is,
Speaker 1: oh getting salt and grinding up rosemary that she found
Speaker 1: in someone's front yard and putting it together, you know,
Speaker 1: but just something simple that you enjoy, that you would
Speaker 1: love to be able to, you know, have a little
Speaker 1: bit more say over because it's most basic. A lot
Speaker 1: of the d I Y stuff is you can make
Speaker 1: something very specific to what you like. So for myself,
Speaker 1: actually one of the first things I ever started doing
Speaker 1: was in high school, just altering clothing. I had an
Speaker 1: old yeah, I had an old thirty dollar junk practice
Speaker 1: uh like kids sewing machine and just the cheapest one
Speaker 1: that Sears used to sell, and could definitely just take
Speaker 1: that and start putting scenes in an altar clothing. And
Speaker 1: like this shirt is now a T shirt, it was
Speaker 1: long sleep before. And that also ties in with you know,
Speaker 1: d I I just to sound like old punks for
Speaker 1: a minute. That d I I definitely also came out
Speaker 1: of things like the riot girl scene in a big way,
Speaker 1: and like the attention to like body awareness and like
Speaker 1: moving away from body negativity and the recognition that as
Speaker 1: a general rule, off the rack clothes are not and
Speaker 1: certainly twenty years ago were extra not actually designed to
Speaker 1: fit most people's bodies, and it was hard to find
Speaker 1: clothes that fit you right. And yeah, so like sewing
Speaker 1: was a big one. Bikes because we were broken, didn't
Speaker 1: have cars, so figuring out how to fix bikes and
Speaker 1: you know, everything that mechanically happens on a bike is
Speaker 1: right there and you can see it happen, and it
Speaker 1: maybe requires a screwdriver and then eventually maybe some other
Speaker 1: tools but there's lots of and there's three resources. A
Speaker 1: lot most cities I've spent any amount of time and
Speaker 1: you can find like you can find like a community
Speaker 1: bike shop where if you have to pay anything, it's
Speaker 1: very minimal, And a lot of cases are just sort
Speaker 1: of like show up and you know there's space to use.
Speaker 1: Yeah when um, Like I know in Santa Cruz there
Speaker 1: was the bike Church. In Portland there's the bike Farm
Speaker 1: and yeah, and Philly there was also a bike church
Speaker 1: because it turns out the basements of churches are are
Speaker 1: There were a couple of spots like that in Dallas
Speaker 1: and it's uh yeah. And I think it is like
Speaker 1: this mix of, like with the body scrub stuff, like
Speaker 1: what is something that appeals to you that you you're
Speaker 1: interested in? And also what is with the bike stuff,
Speaker 1: what is something that's like just doggedly practical, Like you
Speaker 1: get a bike, you need a bike to get around,
Speaker 1: you should probably know how to ship on it. I
Speaker 1: think the reason I say you should pick something that
Speaker 1: appeals to you especially is because a big thing with
Speaker 1: d I Y was that you're doing it yourself, and
Speaker 1: there are so many skills that are valuable to learn
Speaker 1: from other people. It is wonderful to craft in community,
Speaker 1: it is wonderful to work with other people in community.
Speaker 1: It's wonderful to teach skills and gain them. But also
Speaker 1: I've seen this growing idea with the as specialization for
Speaker 1: so many things, especially services comes in that people are
Speaker 1: always like, oh, wow, knitting, I've always wanted to learn.
Speaker 1: I need to take a class in that, or I
Speaker 1: need to And it's really important, I think, for people
Speaker 1: to realize that you can learn things. We are very
Speaker 1: good at learning things, and you don't necessarily need a
Speaker 1: teacher for more complex things you do. But starting with
Speaker 1: something that you really like and that you find really interesting,
Speaker 1: you've already thought about it. So when you start with
Speaker 1: you know, for my friends, starting with making bath salts
Speaker 1: and face masks and stuff, it was something she had
Speaker 1: already been thinking about quite a bit and thinking about stuff.
Speaker 1: So when she started looking at recipes to mix and
Speaker 1: looking on the internet and looking at ingredients, it was
Speaker 1: saying she already cared about. So it's easier to learn
Speaker 1: something that you are interested in, and it's easier to
Speaker 1: learn something that you want to do. But we are
Speaker 1: all capable of learning for ourselves, not every single thing,
Speaker 1: but especially just for craft projects. And so starting with
Speaker 1: that so that you can pick up a book, or
Speaker 1: you can read an article, or you can watch a
Speaker 1: YouTube video and you don't need to take some like
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty dollar a weekend class before you can. It's,
Speaker 1: you know, a big part of the resiliency building. Like
Speaker 1: something you may scoff like when you're thinking about survivalism
Speaker 1: and talking about like making bath scrubs, but a lot
Speaker 1: of the skills you would learn putting that together are
Speaker 1: useful in making like a salve or making like a soap,
Speaker 1: making soap things that you actually need. Like when I
Speaker 1: was traveling, I lived on the road, like out of
Speaker 1: a car and out of backpacks, off and on all
Speaker 1: over the world for years, and I would make my
Speaker 1: own medicated because we would get we would be get
Speaker 1: cuts and scrapes and rashes, and we were poor as
Speaker 1: ship and often there weren't doctors where we were. So
Speaker 1: I learned how to use things like plantain and comfrey
Speaker 1: and yarrow and like bees wax and stuff in order
Speaker 1: to to make medicated savs. And it it was something
Speaker 1: that interested me. But like there's also a lot of
Speaker 1: like there's there's a number of roots into learning that
Speaker 1: sort of thing. And if you're learning how to make
Speaker 1: again something as simple as like a face scrub, learning
Speaker 1: where to find that information for free learning some of
Speaker 1: like the basic techniques in order to do that. The
Speaker 1: learning how to learn is is applicable in a wider
Speaker 1: variety of skill sets, and it I think it's so
Speaker 1: important to focus on what are you what are you
Speaker 1: interested in first, as as opposed to just being like
Speaker 1: okay at first, Now I have to learn how to
Speaker 1: like splint a broken arm, because like the ship's gonna
Speaker 1: hit the fans, like well, to be focus on something
Speaker 1: that's more exciting to you first, and and and and
Speaker 1: build time in your life to learn things. That's an
Speaker 1: enjoyable process. One of the first things I did, like
Speaker 1: years ago, was I learned to sew, specifically to make
Speaker 1: a cause play because you know so, so I would
Speaker 1: just I would make me and my whole family different
Speaker 1: outfits for comic Con. So every year I would, I
Speaker 1: would sew us whole whole new things. But then not
Speaker 1: only taught me sewing, it taught me how to do
Speaker 1: like like vacuum forming to molding, how to use like
Speaker 1: a heat gun, how to use like all these other
Speaker 1: types of tools. Um, how do you like molding and casting?
Speaker 1: Like all of these types of things I learned just
Speaker 1: wanting to make silly costumes. But now they're like, you know,
Speaker 1: useful and a lot, a lot, a lot of other ways.
Speaker 1: And that can be that can be expensive at the
Speaker 1: high end when you're like vacuum forming and stuff your
Speaker 1: storm trooper armor. But the the cheapest side of that
Speaker 1: thing again, you can get a basic hand sewing kit
Speaker 1: for like five dollars from a Walmart. And there's also
Speaker 1: makers and there's maker spaces and like YouTube will do
Speaker 1: the teaching, you know, have to pay for a teacher.
Speaker 1: The Taliban learned how to fly helicopters. On YouTube, you
Speaker 1: can learn how to fix your pants. And then I
Speaker 1: think also you mentioned specialization before. It's come up a
Speaker 1: couple of times, um, and there is you know, the
Speaker 1: idea of specialization. The rationale behind specialization is, oh, well,
Speaker 1: you'll be better at it because that's what you do
Speaker 1: all the time. But that cuts both ways, because if
Speaker 1: you only do one thing all the time, then as
Speaker 1: you know, whatever the maximum threshold of your abilities is
Speaker 1: that's required of you that becomes your baseline, like whatever
Speaker 1: in your day to day life, whatever it is that
Speaker 1: you're being asked to do, that's what you feel capable of.
Speaker 1: And on the flip side, there's with with the d
Speaker 1: I I approach with like teaching yourself ship, learning interesting ship.
Speaker 1: It's also practical and important and useful to be like
Speaker 1: this is a thing that I'm gonna do on a
Speaker 1: regular basis, so I'll get better at it. But also
Speaker 1: it's not you know, there was you know, the whole
Speaker 1: idea of there's what you do and then there's your job,
Speaker 1: and that these need not be the same thing, because
Speaker 1: you want to be able to think, think through things
Speaker 1: in a way that's not the way you're supposed to
Speaker 1: process things to make your boss happy. That is not
Speaker 1: what you do when you clock. And you are more
Speaker 1: than your career, more than your career, and and and
Speaker 1: your skill set need not be purely extracted, as you know,
Speaker 1: not just like Okay, I have to go do the
Speaker 1: thing in order to make money, and then everything else
Speaker 1: is consumption, like you can you can transition like we're
Speaker 1: and this is not a societal level solution because we
Speaker 1: talk a lot about like, well, yeah, you're not gonna
Speaker 1: You're not gonna make small personal changes to fix climate change,
Speaker 1: but changing your own particular attitude on how you approach
Speaker 1: the world from one that is I I produce and
Speaker 1: that I consume to to when we're you're thinking more
Speaker 1: about resiliency and what do I know how to do
Speaker 1: and what can I learn how to do? UM is
Speaker 1: helpful in a variety of ways. On the note of
Speaker 1: you know, the transfer ability of skills and recognizing that
Speaker 1: you already do things on a day to day basis
Speaker 1: that requires specialized knowledge and require skill sets. UM. One
Speaker 1: of the things that I try and trot out at
Speaker 1: every possible opportunity. I worked with somebody in one of
Speaker 1: those volunteer bike shop spaces down New Orleans years ago, UM,
Speaker 1: and the whole purpose of that particular space was to
Speaker 1: make the skill set of bike repair more accessible to
Speaker 1: a population that relied on bikes to get places. And
Speaker 1: one of the folks I worked there with was like
Speaker 1: a very fami lady and was great because we would
Speaker 1: have young girls come into the shop and be like,
Speaker 1: my bike doesn't work. Somebody fixed my bike. My bike
Speaker 1: doesn't work. I don't know how to fix a bike,
Speaker 1: and she was the one who would just be like,
Speaker 1: your tires flat and they'd be like, yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: know how to fix it. Can you fix it? And
Speaker 1: she'd be like, well, you're wearing press on nails, right,
Speaker 1: and I'd be like yeah, like cool, how do you
Speaker 1: put on your press on nails? And they'd walked through
Speaker 1: the steps of like, well, you sand your nails and
Speaker 1: then you put the glue on your nails, and then
Speaker 1: you hold the press on nails on your fingernails for
Speaker 1: a little while and let them set, and then you're
Speaker 1: going to go. And she's like, great, you've just described
Speaker 1: exactly how you patch a bike inner tube. So now
Speaker 1: we just need to get the bike inner tube out,
Speaker 1: and here's the part that corresponds to your nail, and
Speaker 1: here's the part that corresponse like, here's the glue, and
Speaker 1: here's the you know, it's the same process. We just
Speaker 1: have to get the bike inner two out and then
Speaker 1: back in again. But you already know how to do
Speaker 1: the part where you make the bike could work again.
Speaker 1: And that does hit on another important like you know,
Speaker 1: apocalypse or whatever survival point where again all of our
Speaker 1: like fiction and movies focuses on like knowing how to
Speaker 1: use a gun, or like being a woodsman. One of
Speaker 1: the most useful skills, maybe the most useful skill you
Speaker 1: can have in any disaster situation, is being able to
Speaker 1: teach people, like like knowing how to understand figure out
Speaker 1: what people know, and how to get them the additional
Speaker 1: information they need in order to be more resilient and competent,
Speaker 1: because you're always better in a community of people who
Speaker 1: know to handle their ship than alone. And it builds
Speaker 1: on itself too. You know, we both come from different backgrounds,
Speaker 1: but as we've been together and with the different trainings
Speaker 1: that we've had in just life, the projects that we
Speaker 1: take on have become more and more complex. So you know,
Speaker 1: where I used to like to practice gardening and stuff
Speaker 1: and doing a little bit of woodworking and things, and
Speaker 1: now you know, we're doing various construction projects that we're
Speaker 1: kind of self taught, and we have some various home
Speaker 1: depot books on how to do them. But it's it
Speaker 1: doesn't feel nearly as intimidating because we've done steps to
Speaker 1: go to it, and because it's not an all or nothing,
Speaker 1: you don't have to suddenly be like I'm going to
Speaker 1: d I why my entire life. Like I definitely get
Speaker 1: that way sometimes where I'm like, I want to one
Speaker 1: day have everything in my house be made by someone
Speaker 1: that I know or myself, and it's really lovely to
Speaker 1: know crafts people or to you know, make do sit
Speaker 1: down at a pottery wheel and make your own bowls
Speaker 1: or whatever. But a lot of it is about practicing
Speaker 1: stuff when it's not an emergency so that when you
Speaker 1: later on have need or you have the ability, you
Speaker 1: have the time, like you can do a bunch of
Speaker 1: different things. So you know, we refloored the room that
Speaker 1: we're in right now the process, but we didn't get
Speaker 1: there from nothing. And we've both done lots of different
Speaker 1: construction and measuring and other things in little bits just
Speaker 1: for fun, for work, for other stuff beforehand. And a
Speaker 1: lot of these projects are things that are fun to
Speaker 1: do as a one off as a project. I've done,
Speaker 1: you know, embroidery with my kids just for fun, not
Speaker 1: because they need to suddenly embroider all of their clothing
Speaker 1: or they have to sew everything, but it's because it's
Speaker 1: a fun thing to do on a rainy day, or
Speaker 1: you know, try fixing a book, not because there's no
Speaker 1: ability to go on Amazon and order another book. But hey, look,
Speaker 1: I just we didn't add one thing to the landfill waste,
Speaker 1: and we don't have to fix all of the stuff
Speaker 1: we have. It's a one time prep but then later
Speaker 1: on when stuff's falling apart, or when we have supply
Speaker 1: chain issues, or when stuff's not there, it's handy to know, like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know what, Like we're having water rationing right now,
Speaker 1: because during the one of the droughts I grew up
Speaker 1: in California, we had water rationing and it was my
Speaker 1: mom hauled out of the basement my grandmother's old ringer
Speaker 1: machine and we were doing the laundry and that because
Speaker 1: it could conserved a hell of a lot of water
Speaker 1: and you could use the same water for load after load.
Speaker 1: It's good to just have those things just kind of
Speaker 1: on hand that you've tried, because when an emergency hits,
Speaker 1: you don't want to be trying to search the internet
Speaker 1: are looking for something because you've never done it before
Speaker 1: and now it's necessary. And it's it's again to the
Speaker 1: point of like how the how collapse really looks versus
Speaker 1: how it's often pictured. You're not trying to replicate when
Speaker 1: you're when you're doing your own laundry that way, you're
Speaker 1: not trying to replace civilization. You're patching a hole, like
Speaker 1: and and that's a lot of building resiliency is knowing
Speaker 1: that you have. It's like it's being able to fix
Speaker 1: a bike tire, it's pat ching a hole. And I
Speaker 1: do want to acknowledge that, like this is a little
Speaker 1: bit more outside of the dead center of mainstream in
Speaker 1: you know, the United States and some other like wealthy
Speaker 1: industrialized countries. And it's not like it has never stopped
Speaker 1: being the way most people in the world kind of.
Speaker 1: I have one story to tell from these people I
Speaker 1: was billeted with in Iraq. These these guys were like
Speaker 1: pulling people out of air strike craters every day, and
Speaker 1: we wanted to watch TV. One nine. We were in
Speaker 1: like a bombed out mosque that Isis had been using,
Speaker 1: and they had a refrigerator that worked in a TV
Speaker 1: that Isis had cut the chords with. And this guy
Speaker 1: just started pulling chords out of the fridge in about
Speaker 1: five minutes, had the TV working, had like hooked it,
Speaker 1: lashed everything together. It was like he wasn't a TV
Speaker 1: repairment or refridge. He just knew how electricity and ship
Speaker 1: worked and was able to figure out like, Okay, I
Speaker 1: can just put all this ship together, We're good to go.
Speaker 1: And and just also to loop back around to the
Speaker 1: whole like survival mentality a little bit. One of the
Speaker 1: things that like people that we've worked with, people who
Speaker 1: like have been in emergency situations that require, you know,
Speaker 1: complex skill sets and things of one of the big
Speaker 1: things is to have a role that you are competent
Speaker 1: in that you are ready to fulfill. So you don't
Speaker 1: have to figure out your first step. You can get moving.
Speaker 1: You can figure out your first step. So for example,
Speaker 1: in the you know, the supply chain issues that hit
Speaker 1: at the start of COVID and are recurring, um, the
Speaker 1: idea of like oh there's no way to like there's
Speaker 1: no laundry soap. Say okay, well we've got borax and
Speaker 1: these other making soda borax, right, we can we can
Speaker 1: make our own laundry detergent in a pinch and it'll
Speaker 1: work well enough. Cool. Don't have to have that be
Speaker 1: the thing that stresses us out and like adds to
Speaker 1: our like paralysis. Yeah, and get a huge part of
Speaker 1: it is even how you approach the problem it's not
Speaker 1: freaking out like, oh my god, there's no laundry soap,
Speaker 1: how am I going to clean and close? It's being like, oh,
Speaker 1: there's no laundry soap, I'm gonna go online because we
Speaker 1: still have that and try to figure out either other
Speaker 1: things that can make laundry soap that there are, And
Speaker 1: like it's it's accepting. Like you talk about like wanting
Speaker 1: to be competent in a role, you don't have to
Speaker 1: know what that is from the start, as long as
Speaker 1: like the starting point isn't I'm going to be the
Speaker 1: medic I'm going to be this, I'm gonna be the
Speaker 1: food or it's like no, I'm going to start learning
Speaker 1: how to do things I don't know how to do,
Speaker 1: and over a period of time, if I am dedicated
Speaker 1: that I will figure out the thing that I want
Speaker 1: to get most competent at. Yeah, because I mean, none
Speaker 1: of none of what we've been talking about in terms
Speaker 1: of the various crafts and projects that we've undertaken are
Speaker 1: things that are like our primary function in the world.
Speaker 1: It's just like, well, at some point it seemed like
Speaker 1: it was worth new, and so we did some of it,
Speaker 1: and then we kept doing it now, and there's always
Speaker 1: pretty good. Literally everything we've talked about. There's the you're
Speaker 1: a I don't know, bougie hipster version of like doing
Speaker 1: it expensively. Even with like woodworking, there could be a
Speaker 1: dirt cheap. I built a table for almost nothing when
Speaker 1: I was younger because it was like, well, I found
Speaker 1: this would that the city chopped down, and I bought
Speaker 1: sand paper and staying for fifteen dollars, and then I
Speaker 1: got like a fucking base for my Ikea and I
Speaker 1: had a functional table and I figured it out using YouTube.
Speaker 1: And it's you know, not as good a table as
Speaker 1: I could have made if I had ten or thousands
Speaker 1: of dollars in woodworking tools, but I had a table
Speaker 1: for years because of it um and it's it's accepting
Speaker 1: the because I think people do get freaked out. There's
Speaker 1: such an emphasis on like having the gear, getting the equipment,
Speaker 1: stockpiling things, and like really stockpiling competency is better because yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think the Amazon wish list ability to just
Speaker 1: be like, oh, I want this specific thing, I can
Speaker 1: in three seconds look it up online and find the
Speaker 1: exact thing that I want definitely pushes in the opposite
Speaker 1: direction and makes people a little less resilient in that
Speaker 1: capacity because there's less of that idea that you can
Speaker 1: just have stuff. And I would just say, if people
Speaker 1: want to get started with it, it's really pick something
Speaker 1: low stakes, pick something simple, because you build the abilities,
Speaker 1: you build the ability to learn. And um, I hadn't
Speaker 1: explained to me once. It's like a hangar. Every skill
Speaker 1: you get X as a hangar, and having really basic,
Speaker 1: simple things is actually super necessary because even even the
Speaker 1: like hardcore primitive skills. I have some amazing books that
Speaker 1: I bought when I was eighteen, and I remember I
Speaker 1: had them and I looked through and I read it
Speaker 1: and I was like, this is like reading magic. I
Speaker 1: understand absolutely none of it. And after a few years
Speaker 1: of doing things, not even necessarily a traditional skills, but
Speaker 1: just things, practicing stuff, picking stuff, there was so much
Speaker 1: more framework that I had that I looked through and
Speaker 1: suddenly there was stuff concepts that I could hang all
Speaker 1: of these incredible skills on. And we're like, oh, that
Speaker 1: never made sense to me. I understand it now because
Speaker 1: I've done simpler things and starting with thing that doesn't
Speaker 1: seem like overwhelming to learn something simple and something something
Speaker 1: most stakes something that if you utterly mess it up,
Speaker 1: if you have a what are the like like the
Speaker 1: regrets the like craft epic craft failed that it's okay,
Speaker 1: it's not a big deal because failing is part of learning.
Speaker 1: And so pick things that it's okay to fail at
Speaker 1: as your as your projects and and don't as many
Speaker 1: of us did in the late nineties and early two
Speaker 1: thousand's when we didn't have health insurance of any description,
Speaker 1: you know, experiment on ourselves and our friends with herbs
Speaker 1: because we didn't have healthcare access to dr avoid doing
Speaker 1: that is not low stakes. Yeah, I'm about to go
Speaker 1: do open surgery on my own infected wound now that
Speaker 1: you've told me this, and I'm really excited, really excited.
Speaker 1: I got I got an exact deal, I got some vodka.
Speaker 1: At least we're good to go. No, the key is
Speaker 1: really hot glue, same as surgical stitch. I have not
Speaker 1: because then it sterilizes the wound, really doesn't stick to anything.
Speaker 1: This is how I know you are not a crafter.
Speaker 1: Is hot glue does not anything. You just you squirt
Speaker 1: it in there, You get it in there real good,
Speaker 1: and then you cover it with with superglue. I do
Speaker 1: have a grandpa that has blue plug in the world.
Speaker 1: I would put superglue in first. I do have a
Speaker 1: grandpa that has used superglue so many times to glue
Speaker 1: his body back together. It is actually that's very funny.
Speaker 1: It's effective at that. Anyway, here's our medical advice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: don't do it of the things that were just said.
Speaker 1: But if you do want to learn how to do suitsus,
Speaker 1: you can find guides where people do it on Chicken,
Speaker 1: which is how if you're an e M T you
Speaker 1: learn how to do it. And it's that's a that
Speaker 1: is a skill you can build for very little money.
Speaker 1: That's useful and you don't have to start on your
Speaker 1: friends bodies. And I will put in a plug for like,
Speaker 1: wilderness first aid courses are not cheap and there are
Speaker 1: some real good ones out there, and as a as
Speaker 1: like a baseline that is a real handy and helps
Speaker 1: you think about things creatively because wilderness first aid unlike
Speaker 1: an ambulance driver. An ambulance driver is driving in a
Speaker 1: box with all the tools they need, and wilderness first
Speaker 1: aid the assumption is don't have a box. You don't
Speaker 1: have to and so you have to work it out
Speaker 1: probably you know, uh, some plantain or something or some
Speaker 1: the right fucking kind of sap. There's like ship you
Speaker 1: can use which we will not proceed to attempt to
Speaker 1: lift off here and provide medical advice. Don't go to
Speaker 1: a doctor, No use playing needles, make your own needle
Speaker 1: t do craft books, cure your COVID, find a bee
Speaker 1: hive and start sucking. And the other sources are any
Speaker 1: other sources have a great book called Making Stuff and
Speaker 1: Doing Things from way back in the day. Definitely recommend
Speaker 1: that one. Um country know how, like there's some a
Speaker 1: lot of old craft books actually, UM, the entire back
Speaker 1: collection of the Mother Earth magazine skills stuff like I
Speaker 1: have definitely made any setting magazine, not Emma Goldman's anarchists newspaper,
Speaker 1: but I've definitely made solar powered dehydrators out of cardboard
Speaker 1: boxes and saran rap from the from Mother Earth magazine stuff.
Speaker 1: And it's absolutely fantastic. The just old school guide books, UM,
Speaker 1: and but also anything that's listened as like d I
Speaker 1: Y guides that have stuff that you would like to
Speaker 1: make and like to do are great. The library is great.
Speaker 1: Use the library. Research librarians at the library are great
Speaker 1: and if you're like, I'm trying to learn how to
Speaker 1: do this thing? Can you help me find books on it?
Speaker 1: Research librarians at the library they have doctorates in how
Speaker 1: to help you do that, and that's they just sit
Speaker 1: at desks all day waiting for me. And what you'll
Speaker 1: learn from them about how to answer those questions for
Speaker 1: yourself is also useful in the long run. We'll go
Speaker 1: out and make a reflux. Still is that legal? Well, no,
Speaker 1: not in most places. But it's easy. You just need
Speaker 1: a box inside of a box and you pour old
Speaker 1: beer in the center box and that's like saran wrap
Speaker 1: on what's avoiding star evation? My autonomous neighborhood collectives? Uh?
Speaker 1: This is it could happen here a podcast about things
Speaker 1: not being as good as they are and trying to
Speaker 1: make them better. I'm Robert Evans my co host today
Speaker 1: as many days Garrison Davis Garrison say hello to the people,
Speaker 1: high people, Garrison. What are we? What are we? What
Speaker 1: do we? What do we? What do we? What do we?
Speaker 1: What do we do? What do we do? What are
Speaker 1: we doing today? Thank you? We are going to be
Speaker 1: having a discussion on um food and food preservation and
Speaker 1: finding do you mean like putting in the freezer. Well,
Speaker 1: what if the freezer is not working. The freezer is
Speaker 1: always working. This is America's never breaking. The power goes
Speaker 1: out for two weeks. Well, that's one of our guests
Speaker 1: for today. Uh my friends be in a Lane, um,
Speaker 1: who you've heard earlier this week and who We're going
Speaker 1: to talk about food storage and particularly again our focus
Speaker 1: this week is, like we keep getting a lot of
Speaker 1: people being like I have no money or very little
Speaker 1: money or very little space. I'm not gonna be able
Speaker 1: to grow things. How can I possibly, you know, gather food,
Speaker 1: store food, like build resiliency. I don't have any any
Speaker 1: kind of farmland. And the good news is, no matter
Speaker 1: where you live, things that are edible grow, and you
Speaker 1: can get those things and you can find ways to
Speaker 1: make them last longer than they would if you just
Speaker 1: kept them in a sack. And that's a pretty cool
Speaker 1: thing to do. So I'm going to hand it over
Speaker 1: to be in a Lane. I love that. Okay, I
Speaker 1: don't have much space, I don't have much money. Was
Speaker 1: kind of how I got into doing canning in the
Speaker 1: first place. For myself. I used to be very very poor.
Speaker 1: I was on food stamps. I had no money. I
Speaker 1: was a broke punk, and one of my friends was like,
Speaker 1: oh man, there's this farmer at the farmer's market it
Speaker 1: and if you help them clean up, they'll let you
Speaker 1: take away whatever leftover produce they have that they don't want,
Speaker 1: so you can just load up a bag with produce.
Speaker 1: All you gotta do is help them load the truck
Speaker 1: at the end of the day. So that's what I
Speaker 1: did every single Wednesday for the next five years, no
Speaker 1: matter what come, hell or high water. But with that
Speaker 1: that also came there's you started realizing that there's gluts
Speaker 1: and then lacks of things. Um much like you know,
Speaker 1: everything that's happening in society now, just in general. There
Speaker 1: was seasons when there was nothing but you were It
Speaker 1: was easy to at the end of a farmer's market
Speaker 1: day walk home with a fifty pound flat of tomatoes,
Speaker 1: and you know times of the year where it was
Speaker 1: nothing but cabbage and you might have wanted tomatoes a lot.
Speaker 1: And canning was great because it helped to equal out
Speaker 1: when I could get things without having to dive into
Speaker 1: the you know, sixty books a month, I got in
Speaker 1: food stamps and spend it at the farmer's market on
Speaker 1: that instead, I could use it to have a variety
Speaker 1: of vegetables or canned goods or other things in order
Speaker 1: to flavor my raman. Yeah. I first came at this
Speaker 1: kind of from working on farms, where similarly there are gluts.
Speaker 1: There are times of year where you literally cannot eat
Speaker 1: melons fast enough, and everybody who works on farms talked
Speaker 1: about getting the melon ships because you're eating as many
Speaker 1: melons as you possibly can, and it turns out that
Speaker 1: doesn't always agree with you. Um and uh. And then
Speaker 1: you know there's the time of year where well, if
Speaker 1: you want to eat some month old potatoes and some
Speaker 1: two month old squash and maybe some storage cabbage, great,
Speaker 1: and otherwise there's no produce to be had. So preserving
Speaker 1: food is well, there's a lot of different ways to
Speaker 1: do it, and it seems really intense a lot of
Speaker 1: the time because people talk about like batchuli is um,
Speaker 1: you're going to die of botulism if you have home
Speaker 1: canned food. And so first off, there's just to dispel
Speaker 1: a lot of myths about things, there's actually really really
Speaker 1: really low instances of bauchul is is um Um. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to say it doesn't happen, But there's actually
Speaker 1: very few cases of bauchuli is um per year, and
Speaker 1: a lot of them are from industrial canned goods. Don't
Speaker 1: eat a can if it's bowing out in the sides
Speaker 1: of the top, Throw the can, well bury the can,
Speaker 1: bury it in the woods far away. But then also
Speaker 1: beyond canning, there's a lot of different ways of food preservation.
Speaker 1: You know, you were joking about, like, but don't toss
Speaker 1: it in the freezer. I don't know. I toss a
Speaker 1: lot of things in the freezer. Shouldn't not a bad idea? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, we got all sorts of animals from the
Speaker 1: farm in the freezer right now. We've got a lot
Speaker 1: of blueberries because a couple of squirrels. Yeah that was
Speaker 1: a random thing. Um, just just some squirrels on the
Speaker 1: side side squirl for squirrel for heat is, But yeah,
Speaker 1: they were. It's not that having a freezer is a
Speaker 1: bad idea. It's just that the freezer depends on you know,
Speaker 1: having power, or at least having a backup power source
Speaker 1: or a generator or or or um and in the
Speaker 1: case that you don't have access to those things or
Speaker 1: can't afford to get a whole extra freezer and that
Speaker 1: fills up a substantial part of or can't afford power
Speaker 1: the freezer. Um you know, we we definitely saw this
Speaker 1: past winter with the power outages that were caused by um,
Speaker 1: you know, in clement weather, and it suddenly became very
Speaker 1: hard to acquire dry ice because dry ice will keep
Speaker 1: stuff cold for longer. But everybody who's gone camping and
Speaker 1: use dry ice and they're cooler knows that. So as
Speaker 1: soon as there's an interruption in people's ability to refrigerate
Speaker 1: their food, the entire regional stock of dry ice is
Speaker 1: going to disappear. So what we're looking at more in
Speaker 1: what we're talking about today is a little bit more
Speaker 1: like the things that you don't need to keep anywhere,
Speaker 1: but like a cabinet that maybe doesn't get boiling hot,
Speaker 1: and if it's sort of a room temperature cabinet, you
Speaker 1: can store a lot of stuff. I've personally found the
Speaker 1: backs of closets, like, think about all of the areas
Speaker 1: that you don't clean that you're like, I just shove
Speaker 1: things back here and hope that they disappear because I
Speaker 1: don't actually care about them, or like the backs of
Speaker 1: broom closets. UM that actually for a long time was
Speaker 1: my place where I would store canned goods because you
Speaker 1: can just stack the palettes of jars, the flats of them.
Speaker 1: Because if you buy jars from this supermarket, UM buy
Speaker 1: mar canning stores anywhere Safe Way has them, Walmart has them,
Speaker 1: you can. They're not expensive. You can just they come
Speaker 1: in a little square flat and so after I would
Speaker 1: fill them, I just put them all back in there
Speaker 1: and then I could just stack those as a little
Speaker 1: tower and then you know, hand them out as gifts
Speaker 1: for the rest of the year, which was also definitely
Speaker 1: saying that you do when you have absolutely no money
Speaker 1: and people are like, oh, we're having a New Year's
Speaker 1: Eve party and you're like, I brought you jam, and
Speaker 1: they're like, oh, great, blueberry lovely. But it's nice as
Speaker 1: something to be you can give people beyond canning, because sometimes,
Speaker 1: like right now, it's incredibly hard to find the metal
Speaker 1: lids that go on canning jars or in some cases
Speaker 1: the jars. That's actually was recently looking for more jar
Speaker 1: lids and ended up buying flats of jars instead, because
Speaker 1: as four different stores told me, there's a supply chain
Speaker 1: disruption in getting jar lids. There's also a lot of
Speaker 1: ways that you can preserve stuff with drying. You can
Speaker 1: also do a lot with salt, vinegar and sugar preserving
Speaker 1: as well, so that you don't necessarily need the resealable
Speaker 1: jars or like new lids for that. So there's a
Speaker 1: bunch of different methods um lact of fermentation as well,
Speaker 1: like fermenting things. So what would you like to talk
Speaker 1: about first? Let's start with just like what is what
Speaker 1: is the actual process of canning beyond like just dumping
Speaker 1: stuff into a can and sealing it. Um. So there's
Speaker 1: canning by itself is ceiling jars with heat. So that was,
Speaker 1: oh God, really really came into its own around like
Speaker 1: World War two was like industrial canning. And the thing
Speaker 1: about it is even within canning, there's two different types.
Speaker 1: There's low heat and high heat canning. Low heat is
Speaker 1: actually just boiling water temperature, and high heat you actually
Speaker 1: need to go above the temperature of boiling water. So
Speaker 1: you can pressure can. Um, you need a pressure cooker.
Speaker 1: They terrify me. I don't pressure can because I haven't
Speaker 1: quite gotten over the images of when they explode and
Speaker 1: give people steam burns. I know plenty of people who
Speaker 1: do pressure can and it's great for them. You can
Speaker 1: pressure can at high heat anything. You can toss raw
Speaker 1: fish or raw meat in oil and jars or in
Speaker 1: water in jars, and you can pressure can it and
Speaker 1: it will cook and seal the jars and it is
Speaker 1: very safe. Low temperature canning is still relying on one
Speaker 1: of the other methods like salt, sugar, acid for the
Speaker 1: to keep down bacteria. So all it does, though is
Speaker 1: it makes the same so you can do this with
Speaker 1: or without canning. It just makes the jars keep a
Speaker 1: lot longer because it preserves them. So it's the process
Speaker 1: of you take a jar and then you either use
Speaker 1: a clean ring. If you're using those latching reusable jars
Speaker 1: with these nice rings on them that you can use
Speaker 1: over and over again, really handy when there are supply
Speaker 1: chain disruptions to know that you can reuse your jar
Speaker 1: and ring. We're talking about like the Mason jars that
Speaker 1: you you you would get in UH bars that are
Speaker 1: too expensive five years ago. They would pour your terrible
Speaker 1: I P A in them. Yeah, but you can use
Speaker 1: them for other things too. These are the well there's
Speaker 1: two there's the jars that have a lid that is
Speaker 1: attached and it lay and so those have a those
Speaker 1: have a rubber gas that you can and as long
Speaker 1: as you keep those oiled and clean, you can reuse
Speaker 1: those for years. They do eventually wear out, but they
Speaker 1: use a long time. Others is Mason or ball canning jars,
Speaker 1: and those actually have a two piece top. They have
Speaker 1: a middle ring that you just need to make sure
Speaker 1: it's not like horrifically dented or rusted through. It's reusable
Speaker 1: for a very long time. And then you have a lid,
Speaker 1: and the lid can only really they are recommended to
Speaker 1: only use once I've re used them, like twice used
Speaker 1: to can once you can like once it's canned and
Speaker 1: you you can take stuff out, put it back on.
Speaker 1: You don't have to like replace the lid every time
Speaker 1: you get some preserves out. Yeah, but the tiny piece
Speaker 1: of rubber that is what steals it is very thin,
Speaker 1: and so it's not very reusable for multiple can't batches
Speaker 1: of food and true to farm. You know, if you
Speaker 1: go looking around in you know, rummage sales, vintage stores, whatever,
Speaker 1: you will probably find either very cheap or very overpriced.
Speaker 1: Some of those old hinged jars and tons of Mason jars.
Speaker 1: And tons of Mason jars, you will often need to
Speaker 1: replace either the lids or the rubber gaskets in order
Speaker 1: to make them safe to star food in. But in
Speaker 1: either case, whether you're using the little the mason or
Speaker 1: ball jars that you'll find in lots of stores or
Speaker 1: the big latching ones, um, the jars are the more
Speaker 1: expensive spots things. The lids and the rubber rings are
Speaker 1: more inexpensive to replace. So if you can find them
Speaker 1: at Goodwill, if you can find them at Goodwill bins
Speaker 1: or all the places, it's great, you should always grab them.
Speaker 1: Jars are never a bad idea. So canning there's a
Speaker 1: million different ways to can. I do a lot of jam, jellies, pickles,
Speaker 1: and tomatoes, which are all things that are cammed that
Speaker 1: are preserved either with acid or sugar. In either case, um,
Speaker 1: James and jelly is being sugar and pickles and stuff
Speaker 1: being acid. Yes, those are my two favorites. They're very
Speaker 1: simple to learn, and then you can always expand recipes
Speaker 1: and everything else. Um. But with pickles and tomatoes and
Speaker 1: other things, having the PHB very acidic is what actually
Speaker 1: does the preservation of the food and keeps down fungus
Speaker 1: is molds, bacterias and stuff. And with jams and jellies,
Speaker 1: the natural acidity of the fruit mixed with a lot
Speaker 1: of sugar is what keeps the fruits from going bad
Speaker 1: or anything. And the great thing about canning fruit is that,
Speaker 1: like when you when you're thinking about what is the
Speaker 1: greatest number of free calories available to most people in
Speaker 1: a city during the seasons where fruit grows, it's often
Speaker 1: going to be fruit, and like you you'd be surprised.
Speaker 1: Like where you can do like Los Angeles where I
Speaker 1: used to live, there was much of the year, like
Speaker 1: seven eight months you could fill your arms with fruit
Speaker 1: if you knew where to go. And there's an app
Speaker 1: called Falling Fruit that you can use to find people
Speaker 1: mark like where different trees are a lot of Like
Speaker 1: you'll be surprised. Even if you think, like, well, there's
Speaker 1: no fruit in my area, try falling Fruit. You you
Speaker 1: may find that out. Actually there's a shipload of fruit.
Speaker 1: And I just was not looking or as you often find,
Speaker 1: I didn't realize that was an edible plant. I assume
Speaker 1: those berries were. We're not food, and they can be
Speaker 1: and and that's a lot of like free you know
Speaker 1: when you especially when you're making preserves that's really colorically dense,
Speaker 1: and and that also ties in with in the sort
Speaker 1: of survival utility aspect of this, because like canning is fun,
Speaker 1: and harvesting fruit it's fun, and having stuff you made
Speaker 1: to steel pomegranates from rich people's houses do it, sure, absolutely,
Speaker 1: I mean, but part of part of the other thing
Speaker 1: to think about here is that like providing yourself with
Speaker 1: a reserve of different kinds of nutrition and different like
Speaker 1: there's you get an assortment of stuff so you know
Speaker 1: you aren't having to constantly buy it because honestly, the
Speaker 1: most expensive in terms of carbon output, the most expensive
Speaker 1: in terms of cost per calorie in grocery stores tends
Speaker 1: to come from the stuff that's you know, been shipped
Speaker 1: up from Argentina because it's not in season up here.
Speaker 1: While you're getting grapes in January, right and blueberries, you
Speaker 1: can actually watch them move all the way down the
Speaker 1: northern hemisphere over the course of the growing season until
Speaker 1: they're like growing them down in Chile right before they
Speaker 1: start being able to grow them again. So yeah, so
Speaker 1: just thinking about like the things that are available when
Speaker 1: they are available, um. And you'll see this all the time,
Speaker 1: like the good florage spots. When they're available, there will
Speaker 1: be crowds of people all they're all collecting stuff UM
Speaker 1: and getting to know some of the things that you
Speaker 1: like and that grow near you, and what time of
Speaker 1: year they come into season, and maybe forming some relationships
Speaker 1: with people and being like, hey, I noticed you have
Speaker 1: a chestnut tree in your backyard. Can I come and
Speaker 1: harvest chestnuts? Hey, you have this kind of oak? Can
Speaker 1: I come and get acorns from you? Because I want
Speaker 1: to do a leeching project. Hey, I was grabbing apples
Speaker 1: and I noticed that you're harvesting all these acorns. I
Speaker 1: didn't know that you could do anything with acorns. What
Speaker 1: is what are you doing with all those acorns? And
Speaker 1: one of the greatest things too, is that a good
Speaker 1: fruit tree makes a lot of fruit. So much so
Speaker 1: you know, we have a little plum that's near our house.
Speaker 1: It's a little plum tree and since this year we
Speaker 1: managed to get to it before the raccoon did that
Speaker 1: likes to clamber over the roof. We got about two
Speaker 1: and fifty pounds of plums off of the small fruit
Speaker 1: tree and it is not very big. It has a
Speaker 1: footprint of maybe about ten ft in diameter of the
Speaker 1: widest part of the tree. But it drops quite a
Speaker 1: bit of fruit, especially if we get to it before
Speaker 1: it all drops on the ground and our cars in
Speaker 1: the driveway and the walkway and the cat and the cat.
Speaker 1: But if we get to it, it's a lot. So honestly,
Speaker 1: I set aside about a fifty pound tub that was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: we're gonna make some jam. We're gonna dry some of these,
Speaker 1: we're going to do things with it, and the rest
Speaker 1: we're able to give to friends. We toss some of
Speaker 1: the free fridges, we toss some all. You know, we
Speaker 1: handed out because one good fruit tree makes a lot.
Speaker 1: So when you see fruit trees around town, when you
Speaker 1: walk under someone's cherry tree, it's okay to ask for
Speaker 1: fruit too, because I don't know anyone that uses every
Speaker 1: single piece of fruit off of any other fruit trees.
Speaker 1: And you know, one of the things that you will
Speaker 1: see is that um a lot of cities try to
Speaker 1: discourage people from planting fruit trees along roads very cisely
Speaker 1: because when they come into fruit, they produce so much
Speaker 1: fruit that it causes a problem. Also, it's a good
Speaker 1: way to form relationships in your neighborhood. You say like, hey,
Speaker 1: we have a whole bunch of plums, we have a
Speaker 1: ton of whatever is dropping all over your front yard.
Speaker 1: And then your neighbors may be like, oh, those weirdos
Speaker 1: who were collecting fruit that one time. This tree in
Speaker 1: my backyard that's about to drop all this stuff. I'll
Speaker 1: let them know and maybe they'll come so I don't
Speaker 1: have to clean it up afterwards. Yeah, which is again
Speaker 1: like people, we talk a lot about the importance of
Speaker 1: building like community resiliency and community self defense, and folks
Speaker 1: act like, well, how do I actually do that? Well,
Speaker 1: that's maybe that's a start for you. Maybe the start
Speaker 1: is like you get to know what do they have?
Speaker 1: What do I have? And then you start talking about like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm gonta can some stuff. Do you want to learn
Speaker 1: how to can? You're like, oh, well, I was going
Speaker 1: to dry at east do you want to learn it? Like,
Speaker 1: or do you want to borrow a dehydrator? And then
Speaker 1: you're making connections that are very practical and also social
Speaker 1: in your area. Also one plug, we've talked a little
Speaker 1: bit about the process of canning dehydrators are great and
Speaker 1: are pretty affordable, and they're not expensive, yeah, like I
Speaker 1: think you know, for sixty to eighty bucks, you can
Speaker 1: usually get a decent dehydrator. And if you don't have one,
Speaker 1: but you have an oven, if you put things on
Speaker 1: a baking rack very low heat, you can just put it.
Speaker 1: I would just turn my oven onto warm, and you
Speaker 1: can lay out things in your oven. I have a
Speaker 1: nicer oven now that won't let me do this, But
Speaker 1: when I used to live in my first junkie apartment,
Speaker 1: I would literally just stick a metal spoon, like a
Speaker 1: one of my big cooking spoons in the door of
Speaker 1: the ovens so that it would open, and that would
Speaker 1: just vent all of the steam of whatever I was
Speaker 1: drying in the oven. So and meanwhile, if you live
Speaker 1: in say a really dry climate or a climate where
Speaker 1: you have a really dry stretch of time when fruit
Speaker 1: is in season, and you have window screens and an
Speaker 1: area where you can make sure there's a steady breeze
Speaker 1: flowing across your your fruit, cut it thin, lay it
Speaker 1: out in the sun. And that's why there's so much
Speaker 1: sun dried X, Y and Z. That's really expensive. When
Speaker 1: you go to dram Joe's or whatever. And it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's not just a matter we shouldn't just say that
Speaker 1: like this is you have to forage for all this stuff,
Speaker 1: like it can be a matter of like, well, during
Speaker 1: these months, beef is is much cheaper, It's half as
Speaker 1: much as it will be later. I'm going to buy
Speaker 1: beef when it's cheap, and I'm going to make jerky now,
Speaker 1: and then I will have protein when I can't afford
Speaker 1: to purchase protein or as much protein later. In the air,
Speaker 1: speaking of jerky, I mean like one of the just
Speaker 1: in the vein of you know, building your own dehydrator
Speaker 1: or something. One other thing that h that that I've
Speaker 1: done is you can just get a you know, a
Speaker 1: decent box fan and some furnace filters and strap them
Speaker 1: all together and that can very successfully dry out jerky.
Speaker 1: Um so D dehydrators. There's a lot of different ways
Speaker 1: to Yeah, it is literally just kind of warm or
Speaker 1: less in some cases, and air that is moving, and
Speaker 1: it's it's like everything we've been talking about. There's the
Speaker 1: you can buy very expensive dehydrators if you want to,
Speaker 1: if you want to get a primo jerky making together,
Speaker 1: you can you can make that a real expensive thing,
Speaker 1: or you can do it for like trash, like with
Speaker 1: with discarded crap that you find around in people's like
Speaker 1: take piles. And I think also the other thing to
Speaker 1: think about we're talking about it's not all foraging, is
Speaker 1: to think about we've been talking about supply chain disruptions,
Speaker 1: but also one of the things in our current circumstances
Speaker 1: is the weird gluts and excesses and surpluses that are
Speaker 1: produced by our supply chains. And again, one of the
Speaker 1: big ways that I learned about food preservation was food
Speaker 1: not bombs and food preservation and also just food preparation
Speaker 1: was food not bombs way back in the day, like
Speaker 1: you need a special sound every time on specifically it
Speaker 1: could happen here someone mentions food not bombs. At this point,
Speaker 1: that was my entry back when I was just kind
Speaker 1: of a liberally journalist guy to like anarchist practice. Was
Speaker 1: like every protest I go to, there's these like krusty
Speaker 1: punks handing out sandwiches, um, and then they have neat stickers.
Speaker 1: I wonder what's going on here and well, and one
Speaker 1: of the important things about food not bombs is that
Speaker 1: food not bombs has sort of two different ways that
Speaker 1: you obtain food for food not bombs. One is you
Speaker 1: form relationships with first farmers, Yeah, people who are going
Speaker 1: to have a lot of food, a lot of supply
Speaker 1: coming in and there's stuff they're not going to be
Speaker 1: able to use, either because it's ugly or you know,
Speaker 1: it's carrots that look like dicks and they don't feel
Speaker 1: comfortable putting the carrots that look like dicks on the shop.
Speaker 1: Or Yeah, so you have your relationships with like local
Speaker 1: businesses and local suppliers who aren't going to be able
Speaker 1: to sell or use some of their stuff. And right
Speaker 1: day old bread, we are a bakery and we pride
Speaker 1: ourselves on fresh bread, so we're going to give our
Speaker 1: day olds and it makes us feel good as liberals
Speaker 1: to give it to food not bombs. And then on
Speaker 1: the flip side, there's the the fact that the supply
Speaker 1: chain is designed to produce these excesses, but then if
Speaker 1: it can't make money off of them, dispose of them.
Speaker 1: That's where you end up with you know, cop scarting,
Speaker 1: copscarding dumpsters for example, don't dumpster from the cops that
Speaker 1: the cop guarded dumpsters. Those are the other dumpsters go
Speaker 1: to other dumpsters. It's infuriating, it's very frustrating. I get
Speaker 1: the desire to yell at the cop. But there will
Speaker 1: you can find dumpsters that are started. If you are
Speaker 1: a store or restaurant, you're legally protected to let people
Speaker 1: go through your dumpster. Yeah, not to you. Yeah, during
Speaker 1: the Clinton administration, there's legislation that was passed that straight
Speaker 1: up said, like at a federal level, if you present
Speaker 1: I think the wording is seemingly wholesome and healthful food
Speaker 1: two people for free, even if it has PASTI expiration date,
Speaker 1: that you are legally protected because it's dumb to throw
Speaker 1: out food just because the thing that stamped on the
Speaker 1: package has expired. Now that does mean if you pick
Speaker 1: up some meat that's expired and the I could just puffy,
Speaker 1: don't eat that. And also there are also local ordinances
Speaker 1: and local laws that do restrict that more because there
Speaker 1: are places where people get arrested for handing out food
Speaker 1: to like you know, homeless people and whatnot. But you know,
Speaker 1: check your local laws before doing anything is radical and
Speaker 1: violent as giving out as giving out free food to
Speaker 1: poor people. Yeah, there are these gluts um and there
Speaker 1: are these points where the supply chain is going to
Speaker 1: dump huge amounts of stuff into the system. For example,
Speaker 1: right now, we just talked about how canning supplies are
Speaker 1: kind of in short supply right now, which is weird.
Speaker 1: I guarantee you that that means in a couple of
Speaker 1: months there's going to be tons of canning supplies everywhere.
Speaker 1: Or you know, when there were power outages in Portland,
Speaker 1: then there was a bunch of stuff, even stuff that
Speaker 1: doesn't need to be refrigerated, was getting thrown out if
Speaker 1: it was stored in the refrigerated section. Yeah, because stores
Speaker 1: have their specific protocols about like oh well if this
Speaker 1: is left, if this freezer is unplugged, we have to
Speaker 1: throw out everything in the freezer. Never mind that a
Speaker 1: bunch of stuff in the freezer straight up says right
Speaker 1: there on it does not require refrigeration or only refrigerate
Speaker 1: after opening, referat after opening. So think about like where
Speaker 1: are your local systems going to produce these huge bloods
Speaker 1: or maybe it's super cheap at certain times of year,
Speaker 1: you know, you maybe corn goes down to like fifteen
Speaker 1: cents an ear or five cents an ear at the
Speaker 1: end of at the at the end of August, right,
Speaker 1: so maybe you can get a whole ton of corn
Speaker 1: and then you can dry it. Like you know, when
Speaker 1: I was a kid, we lived in California, and we
Speaker 1: were not doing a ton of canning. I did not
Speaker 1: grow up canning. I didn't grow up preserving food. I
Speaker 1: didn't in that type of way. But one thing that
Speaker 1: my mom would do is when our little mire lemon
Speaker 1: tree was covered in lemons, she would just juice a
Speaker 1: whole pile of them and then poured into ice cube
Speaker 1: trays and then empty the ice cube trays into gallon bags,
Speaker 1: and then we had, you know, we would make lemonade
Speaker 1: all year round. And her recipe literally called for three
Speaker 1: lemon cubes to how much sugar and stuff as she
Speaker 1: had it measured out, and so she would just pop
Speaker 1: those in and that would just live in the refrigerator
Speaker 1: all year round. Was just constant lemonade. One other plug
Speaker 1: in terms of preserving stuff that I want to talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about, but with the disclaimer that I
Speaker 1: am by no means an expert um. One of the
Speaker 1: other things that you know, the punks of Yesteryear, with
Speaker 1: their food not bombs houses got really excited about was
Speaker 1: things like crowd and kombucha um and there are some
Speaker 1: really great resources out there, specifically um Wild Fermentation and
Speaker 1: the Art of Fermentation, which are both by a guy
Speaker 1: named Sander Cats on how to ferment food without you
Speaker 1: you know, you're using naturally occurring bacteria and fermentation as
Speaker 1: a means of preservation is possibly the oldest means of
Speaker 1: deliberate food storage that human beings have, and you can
Speaker 1: do it with a wide variety of things. And so again,
Speaker 1: if you're faced with one of those gluts where you
Speaker 1: have a ton of stuff and nowhere you can store
Speaker 1: it in your refrigerated storage areas, there's probably a way
Speaker 1: you can jam it, you can dry it, you can
Speaker 1: ferment it, you can you know, make vinegar out of it.
Speaker 1: And you can find guides for all of this for
Speaker 1: free online. Like all of this is accessible if you
Speaker 1: have a phone. There are people in people putting up
Speaker 1: videos on YouTube where you can watch them do it too.
Speaker 1: To make it. You do not have to purchase books
Speaker 1: in order to learn. There's also a lot of ways,
Speaker 1: you know, you can make cold storages in your backyard.
Speaker 1: You can definitely, like I have a lot of guides
Speaker 1: on how to make your own roots sellers than very
Speaker 1: small spaces and do things because as long as you're
Speaker 1: not having your food produce the thing that makes it
Speaker 1: that makes your food go bad. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: different ways that you can prevent food spoilage but that
Speaker 1: you can learn from. But honestly, crowd and caning are
Speaker 1: probably some of the quickest and easiest. And as a
Speaker 1: general rule, um, you know, similarly, if you don't have
Speaker 1: access to building a garden, you probably also don't have
Speaker 1: access to like digging a root seller. That being said,
Speaker 1: if you have a room or a space in your
Speaker 1: house where you can reliably keep it cool and dark
Speaker 1: like below, I don't know, seventy degrees dark. Yeah, like closets,
Speaker 1: there's probably a spot in your basement if you live
Speaker 1: in a house where you have a basement, or if
Speaker 1: you live in a basement, because if you live in
Speaker 1: a situation, um, it's pretty easy. And for that matter,
Speaker 1: when we talk about like roots sellers, there are totally
Speaker 1: some d I y schematics for literally digging a like
Speaker 1: three foot cube hole in your yard and sinking in
Speaker 1: something to line it, and then that's where you store stuff.
Speaker 1: Because if you dig down a few feet below ground.
Speaker 1: It stays fifty degrees your round. Yeah, and I get
Speaker 1: like when you hear again, we keep coming back to this. Like,
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people get overwhelmed or get
Speaker 1: very anxious when they think about trying to build resiliency
Speaker 1: because they live in a tiny apartment, they don't have
Speaker 1: much in the way of money. The important one of
Speaker 1: the most important things to understand that like a lot
Speaker 1: of people, no matter how poor you are, poorer than you,
Speaker 1: have been doing this kind of stuff for generations. Like
Speaker 1: it's why most of our grandparents survived the thirties. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think one thing that people have a misinterpretation
Speaker 1: of with canning and stuff is that they are going
Speaker 1: to put stuff up and they're gonna like put up
Speaker 1: their cans and their jars and then they will eventually
Speaker 1: build this. You know, I have food for twelve years
Speaker 1: buried here. Nothing has that great of a shelf life.
Speaker 1: I mean, I've definitely pulled out some jerim that was
Speaker 1: from definitely didn't do that this year that I had
Speaker 1: forgotten in the back of a cupboard and eating it
Speaker 1: and it's fine. It's fine, but usually a couple three years,
Speaker 1: couple but The idea of canning and preserving was not
Speaker 1: that you are saving food in case the sky falls
Speaker 1: in and everyone is doomed. The reason that people preserve
Speaker 1: food was to extend the bounty of a harvest season
Speaker 1: for a few additional weeks or months. And if you
Speaker 1: think about it that way, you're extending what you have
Speaker 1: two times when it would be more enjoyable to eat
Speaker 1: it when it feels special. No, I mean, it's like jam.
Speaker 1: A big part of the reason for jam is there's
Speaker 1: really important nutrients in fruit that maybe you can't get
Speaker 1: in the dead of winter, but you can if you
Speaker 1: have jam. Just to be a farm nerd for a minute,
Speaker 1: because Robert, I know that you are a huge fan
Speaker 1: of pumpkin spice. Oh. The reason that I had my
Speaker 1: first cup of the season today, amazing monster. The reason
Speaker 1: that pumpkins and cinnamon and apples and baking goods, baked
Speaker 1: goods with reasons in them, are all like a big
Speaker 1: deal and are all like apples are a fruit that
Speaker 1: if you put apples in say a barrel, there's the
Speaker 1: saying about one bad apple. Because if you make sure
Speaker 1: that an apple isn't rotting and you put it in
Speaker 1: a cool, dark space with decent ventilation, apples will keep
Speaker 1: for a very long time. Squash are a big deal.
Speaker 1: Pumpkins are a big deal around this time of year
Speaker 1: because buttercup squash, for example, and butter not squash are
Speaker 1: both storage squash. They taste better if they have been
Speaker 1: sitting in a dark storage area for like two months.
Speaker 1: Then they have metabolized more of their starches into sugars,
Speaker 1: and their tastier. A lot of a lot of like squash, root, vegetables,
Speaker 1: all of that sort of stuff that you associate with,
Speaker 1: you know, all harvest season is specifically storage crops, because
Speaker 1: I'm originally from New England. That's the time of year
Speaker 1: where you stop being able to get food out of
Speaker 1: the ground and everything freezes and dies, and then it
Speaker 1: doesn't start up again until April, and you need a
Speaker 1: way to like keep eating in the meantime. And also, though,
Speaker 1: let's just remember that a lot of preserved foods are
Speaker 1: also meat, not just because they are a substitutor because
Speaker 1: they're staying the harvest, but because in order to preserve
Speaker 1: the food and keep the nutrients you have to go
Speaker 1: through a process. You want to have the salt be
Speaker 1: too high or the acidity be too high, or the
Speaker 1: sugar content be too high, or the water content be
Speaker 1: too low to enable bacterial growth, and so that the
Speaker 1: fruits and vegetables and meats or whatever don't rock. But
Speaker 1: that means that you get so many awesome and different
Speaker 1: flavors that you would never you know, grapes, grapes are great.
Speaker 1: Whatever grapes preserved in wine vinegar. That sounds really cool.
Speaker 1: You can do that, and then you have a completely
Speaker 1: different thing that you normally don't eat, you know, dried
Speaker 1: dried figs, apple chips, like. You also get a whole
Speaker 1: new variety of foods that are not just extending in harvest,
Speaker 1: but are also other things to eat. You know, my
Speaker 1: kids are not going to toss a whole pile of
Speaker 1: fresh in their backpacks sometimes because it squishes at the
Speaker 1: bottom of their backpacks and I find it weeks later,
Speaker 1: and it's absolutely terrifying fortunate. On the other hand, a
Speaker 1: bunch of you know, dried dried prunes, plums and stuff
Speaker 1: from the garden that dried out. They'll take baggies of those,
Speaker 1: and if I find them a month later because they
Speaker 1: didn't eat them, it isn't the end of the world
Speaker 1: either and and again like there's a lot of fun stuff,
Speaker 1: Like you know, yeah, grapes by themselves are are fine.
Speaker 1: You can also turn grapes into stuff that will help
Speaker 1: you preserve other stuff. And raisins in baked goods. If
Speaker 1: you've ever had a loaf of raisin bread and a
Speaker 1: loaf of white bread in the same bread box, the
Speaker 1: white bread will mold first. Raisins are actually a preservative.
Speaker 1: It's why people started putting raisins in bread. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I think we should we should close out, but I
Speaker 1: kind of wanted to do that by circling back to
Speaker 1: the overall topic of this week, which is like building resilia. See,
Speaker 1: when you don't have much in the way of money
Speaker 1: or resources. And one of the things that you may
Speaker 1: not think of his building resiliency is exactly what you
Speaker 1: were talking about being in in you aline paying attention
Speaker 1: to what is available, what time of the year, what
Speaker 1: is cheap, what time of the year, what is like
Speaker 1: when do the gluts happen, and when do the shortages happen?
Speaker 1: Because that doesn't actually cost any money. You don't even
Speaker 1: have to buy things, like you're already you're all always
Speaker 1: going to be going out to the store to get
Speaker 1: food occasionally. It's it's it's keeping an eye on understanding
Speaker 1: what is available growing naturally and what is available in
Speaker 1: the economy, because that connects you more to the environment
Speaker 1: you live in, to the climate as it changes um
Speaker 1: into your community, all of which make you more resilient,
Speaker 1: and none of which costs you a dime. It just
Speaker 1: costs you attention. Also just a plug for you know,
Speaker 1: people who have access to the ecosystems where this is relevant.
Speaker 1: Things like shellfish licenses are great. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: tell anyone that they should, you know, seek out sport
Speaker 1: fishing as a means of obtaining calories. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: in Oregon, at least for I think it's five five bucks,
Speaker 1: nine bucks. Oh, it's up to ten bucks now. But
Speaker 1: so for ten bucks get a shellfish license. You go
Speaker 1: down to a cove and you rape cockles for an hour,
Speaker 1: and then you have, you know, an enormous amount of
Speaker 1: food that you can do all of the preservation that
Speaker 1: we've talked about. You can also just make chowder and
Speaker 1: freeze it, you know whatever. But there's a lot of
Speaker 1: ways to to cheaply obtain calories from out in the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, well that's going to do it for us today. Um.
Speaker 1: Until next time, remember experiment on your friends with different
Speaker 1: medical care treatments. Don't do that. Although on the other hand,
Speaker 1: look up the if you are in the Pacific Northwest,
Speaker 1: there is the Portland Fruit Tree Project up here, which
Speaker 1: goes around and connects gleaners with fruit trees that need
Speaker 1: to be gleaned. Um, so people who have over abundant
Speaker 1: trees that they don't want all the stuff. That's a
Speaker 1: really great resource in other cities, I'm sure there's other things.
Speaker 1: And also the Falling Fruit Map, so you can go
Speaker 1: online and if there's not already one in your area.
Speaker 1: They also make it really easy to be able to
Speaker 1: chart and put in trees in your area. So if
Speaker 1: it's saying that you're excited about and you love identifying trees,
Speaker 1: you can go in and actually start charting your neighborhood.
Speaker 1: Also figure out how to identify, you know, five wild
Speaker 1: plants that grow in your area that you can eat,
Speaker 1: because it's always nice to have more variety and it's
Speaker 1: fun to be out on a walk and be like,
Speaker 1: oh cool, now I have a thing that I can
Speaker 1: toss in with dinner when I get back. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: we've talked about how there's like the poor version of
Speaker 1: the cheap version. There's also like the centrist version and
Speaker 1: the radical version of that. The centrist version is like,
Speaker 1: I just want to know, like what kind of edible
Speaker 1: fruits grow naturally in my area. The more radical version
Speaker 1: is I'm going to start guerrilla grows of edible foods
Speaker 1: on like available in my area. I'm gonna seed ball
Speaker 1: some ship. I'm gonna like very to get insurgent with
Speaker 1: my yeah, to prepare food. Yeah. Things that grow riz
Speaker 1: only take root real easy in the ecosystems they like
Speaker 1: and are real hard to get rid of once they
Speaker 1: get crime gardens. I'm not going to say people should
Speaker 1: tear out the random trees that cities plant and then replace.
Speaker 1: No one can say that, But it's possible to do
Speaker 1: trees didn't make food with trees that did make food
Speaker 1: in the same spot, probably nobody would notice except the
Speaker 1: people who got and there would be more free calories
Speaker 1: in your area. If you know the kind of things
Speaker 1: that have been happening in the last several years continue
Speaker 1: to happen, all right, that's the episode. That's the episode Hey,
Speaker 1: We'll be back Monday, with more episodes every week from
Speaker 1: now until the heat death of the universe. It Could
Speaker 1: Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For
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Speaker 1: zone media dot com, or check us out on the
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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.